The Overdose Crisis among U.S. Adolescents

Every week in 2022, the equivalent of a highschool classroom's worth of students -an average of 22 adolescents -died of drug overdoses in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Drug overdoses and poisonings are now the third-leading cause of pediatric deaths in this country, after firearm-related injuries and motor vehicle crashes. 1 Although drug-related mortality among adults has risen steadily for multiple decades, adolescents had been largely insulated from these increases until the second half of 2019. 2 After more than a decade of holding relatively steady, overdose deaths among adolescents 14 to 18 years of age more than doubled between August 2019 and March 2020 (see graph).Since then, this crisis has further intensified, with 5.2 deaths per 100,000 adolescents in 2022.