Health Affairs June 25, 2024
In February 2024, an article published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) announced that smoking had surpassed injection as the leading route of drug use involved in overdose deaths. Using postmortem data (information from crime scenes, witness reports, and autopsy data), the authors found that the percentage of overdose deaths associated with smoking increased by 73.7 percent between 2020 and 2022. During this same time period, the percentage of overdose deaths associated with injection decreased by 29.1 percent. Importantly, this transition was observed among overdose deaths across a variety of substances: those involving only fentanyls, those involving only stimulants, and those involving a mix of the two.
Smoking drugs has long been promoted as a harm reduction strategy for...
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