Health security

Cocaine deaths up in US, and opioids are big part of it

Cocaine deaths have been rising in the U.S., health officials said Thursday in their latest report on the nation’s deadliest drug overdose epidemic.

After several years of decline, overdose deaths involving cocaine began rising around 2012. And they jumped by more than a third between 2016 and 2017.

The increase at least partly reflects trends in deaths from heroin, fentanyl and other opioid drugs. Many overdose deaths involve several different drugs. The CDC researchers found that nearly three-quarters of the deaths involving cocaine in 2017 were among people who had also taken opioids.

But deaths involving cocaine alone also increased, said Lawrence Scholl of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the study’s authors.