A dozen more Vermonters were reported to have died of an opioid overdose in November 2021, bringing last year’s partial count to 181.
Though December 2021 remains unaccounted for, the latest state data shows that last year’s partial death count is already 15% more than the 157 deaths reported in all of 2020 — previously the highest in Vermont’s books.
The total number of fatal overdoses in 2020 was surpassed in October 2021, at which point 169 deaths had been recorded that calendar year. The rising fatal overdoses in the past two years followed an overall decline in 2019.
Health officials recognized a few months into the coronavirus pandemic that the surging opioid overdose deaths were linked to the public health emergency, which has brought fear, anxiety, depression, stress and isolation.
“There’s no doubt that the past two pandemic years have been harsh ones for those with substance use disorders,” Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said during Vermont Recovery Day on Feb. 16. “For some, this has been relapse; for others, perhaps the new development of a substance use disorder as a coping mechanism to all the stress and hardship that isolation has brought with it.”
The accidental overdoses, Levine said during the remote gathering, have been exacerbated by “an overwhelming surge in fentanyl presence and potency in the drug supply.”
Fentanyl was involved in 93% of the 181 Vermonter deaths due to opioid overdose from January through November last year, according to the state Department of Health’s opioid fatality report released Wednesday.
Because of its potency and relatively low price, the synthetic opioid has been increasingly added by illicit drug manufacturers to their products without the knowledge of users.
Previously dominant opioids have taken a back seat. Prescription opioids, excluding fentanyl, were involved in 22% of last year’s overdose deaths; and heroin, 10%.
Substance use recovery centers statewide are helping distribute “harm reduction kits,” which include the opioid antidote naloxone — often known by the brand name Narcan — and strips that can detect the presence of fentanyl.
The kits have helped prevent what could have been a larger number of overdose deaths, but some users still don’t utilize the fentanyl test strips, said Ralph Bennett, a supervisor at the Turning Point recovery center in Bennington.
“A lot of the people that we’re losing really don't know what they're injecting or snorting,” he said in an interview. “We've dealt with people in our emergency room here, locally, that buy cocaine on the street to use and wind up in the hospital with a fentanyl overdose.”
Bennington County, along with Rutland County, has the highest overdose death rate so far in 2021, recording 39.5 deaths per 100,000 residents. Behind them are Lamoille County at 39.4 and Orange County at 38.1.
As for the number of people who died per county: 23 came from Rutland, 14 from Bennington, 11 from Orange County and 10 from Lamoille.
The director of the Bennington recovery center, Julea Larsen, believes the overdose deaths in the county have remained high, partly because users are caught in a cycle in which they need broader recovery support services to break free from substance use.
Among them, she said, are transitional housing and public transportation that would help people in recovery get to work, school or social service offices.
Recovery advocates in Bennington County, for instance, are working to put up men’s and women’s transitional housing. These shared living spaces aim to help prepare residents, who have just been discharged from inpatient treatment facilities, to living on their own free from substance use.
“I think that housing plays a big key in early recovery, because it's just such a short period of time to make a wrong decision,” Larsen said.
