Number of cocaine overdose deaths hits record in US, CDC reveals

The number of deaths from cocaine has reached record levels, with the drug becoming more popular as the attention of media and health officials focus on the epidemic of opioids .

In the last 12 months, 14,205 Americans died of a cocaine overdose, an increase of 22% over the previous year, according to new data from the Centers for Control and Prevention diseases (CDC).

The worrying increase in the number of stimulant deaths occurs when opioid overdoses begin to gradually decline, dropping by 2.7% from the record level of 2017.

Experts suggest that opioids could still be at the root of the increase in cocaine overdoses, however, more and more batches of illicit drugs have been shown to be linked to the potent drug, fentanyl, which it's revealed to be fatal for opioid consumers.

In the past 12 months of its data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revealed that 14,205 Americans have died from a cocaine overdose that can be caused by fentanyl.

According to the National Institute for Drug Abuse Control (NIDA), the number of Americans who use cocaine has remained stable over the last decade.

The agency determined that about 4.7 million Americans over the age of 12 were using cocaine and that 38 million had consumed it at some point in their lives.

Cocaine is a stimulant, acting on dopamine receptors, rather than opioids such as fentanyl.

Yet in 2017, 7% of the cocaine seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration on the East Coast in 2017 contained fentanyl.

This represented a modest but significant increase of 6% over the previous year.

Cocaine users have adopted "speedballing", an effect that gives them both the "stimulating" effect of the stimulating euphoria of depressed fentanyl, which binds to opioid receptors and depresses the central nervous system.

This practice is not new, it has long been accomplished by combining cocaine and heroin.

However, it is estimated that fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and that it can easily overwhelm the central nervous system, especially for a relatively naive opioid user (such as a consumer of drugs). 39, cocaine abuse, but does not usually consume heroin).

It is not clear that fentanyl is intentionally or mistakenly inserted into lots of cocaine.

Experts are also struggling to determine which drug is the ultimate cause of death when both may be involved in an overdose.

The DEA also warned last month that an influx of cocaine was heading from Colombia to US cities after Colombia had stopped spraying its crops with a pesticide that had slowed the production of the drug.

This year is not the first increase in the number of cocaine overdose deaths. Between 2015 and 2016, the number of cocaine-related deaths increased by 52%.

And the CDC has anticipated the involvement of fentanyl, which it says would eliminate all kinds of drugs, not just heroin and cocaine.

Even the CDC director had close contact with laced cocaine. In July, he told the National Association of County and New Orleans Health Officials that his son was about to die from an overdose of cocaine with fentanyl.

The agency had previously said that the powerful opioid is "probably causing the increase in the number of deaths related to cocaine, due to a lack of knowledge of the potential, even knowledge of fentanyl contamination, "according to the Chicago Sun Times.