U.S. surpassed 100,000 overdose deaths in 2021

More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, more than in any other year on record, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics Wednesday.

Why it matters: The grim milestone, a 15% increase from overdose deaths in 2020, occurred during the coronavirus pandemic, which also killed over 415,000 in the country that year and almost 1 million in total so far.

The data presented is incomplete, as many deaths require more investigating to confirm a cause, though estimates rarely largely differ from the...