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Deaths from cocaine have increased in the United States, health officials said in their latest report on the country's overdose epidemic. (AP Photo / Mark Lennihan, File)
Cocaine death is on the rise in America, and the opioid crisis, the country's deadliest overdose epidemic, is at stake, health officials said Thursday.
Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly three-quarters of cocaine-related deaths in 2017 involved people who also took opioids.
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But deaths related to cocaine alone have also increased, said Lawrence Scholl of the CDC, one of the authors of the study.
The researchers did not investigate why the number of deaths caused by cocaine had increased.
The new report covers the year 2017, the last year for which complete statistics are available.
After several years of decline, cocaine overdose deaths began to increase around 2012. They jumped by more than a third between 2016 and 2017.
Ohio was the state with the highest cocaine mortality rate, but the highest relative increases were observed in Wisconsin and Maryland.
The increase in the number of deaths from cocaine partly reflects at least the evolution of deaths due to heroin, fentanyl and other opioids.
Many overdose deaths involve several different drugs.
Health officials said that about 70,000 Americans died of an overdose in 2017. Nearly 48,000 involved at least one type of opioid. About 28,000 deaths involved fentanyl or another synthetic opioid, 15,500 heroin and 14,500 prescription opioids.
According to the new report, just under 14,000 people have used cocaine.
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Some preliminary data from the CDC suggest that cocaine deaths continued to increase early in 2018, but may have stabilized in the summer. But these are just provisional data, warned one of the other authors of the CDC report, Mbabazi Kariisa.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
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