The United States plans to allocate more than $450 million in new funding to fight drug overdoses, the White House said Thursday, touting a leveling off in such deaths even as the country's addiction crisis rages.
There was a record of around 110,000 drug overdose deaths between March 2022 and March 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with more than one million people having died in overdoses since 1999.
Still, "overdoses have flattened in 2022 after sharp increases from 2019 to 2021, and this shows that our efforts are working," White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Rahul Gupta told reporters Thursday.
But he acknowledged that this slowdown in increasing deaths did not reflect deaths related to fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid that has flooded the US drug market and is responsible for most overdoses in the country.
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