Cocaine deaths in the United States and opioids are an important part of it

NEW YORK. – Deaths of cocaine have risen in the United States, health officials said in their latest report on the country's deadliest drug overdose epidemic.

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

This increase reflects, at least in part, deaths from heroin, fentanyl and other opioid drugs. Many overdose deaths involve several different drugs. CDC researchers found that nearly three-quarters of cocaine-related deaths in 2017 involved people who also took opioids.

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

The researchers did not investigate why the number of deaths caused by cocaine had increased.

Health officials said that about 70,000 Americans died from a drug overdose in 2017. Nearly 48,000 involved at least one type of opioid. About 28,000 deaths involved fentanyl or another type of synthetic opioid, 15,500 heroin and 14,500 prescription opioid analgesics.

According to the new report, just under 14,000 people have used cocaine.

Ohio was the state with the highest cocaine mortality rate, but the largest relative increases were observed in Wisconsin and Maryland.

The new report covers the year 2017, the last year for which complete statistics are available.

Some preliminary data from the CDC suggest that cocaine deaths continued to increase early in 2018, but may have stabilized in the summer. However, "it is provisional data and this may not reflect what we see when we get the final data" for 2018, warned one of the other CDC authors, Mbabazi Kariisa.