A growing number of people in the United States are dying from drug-related accidental injuries.
According to new research presented at the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Clinical Congress 2025 in Chicago, the rate has gone up by nearly 60% over the past five years.
The study found that drug use is now playing a bigger role in unintentional injury deaths, especially among middle-aged adults. Krista L. Haines, a trauma surgery expert at Duke University Medical Center, said that overdose deaths are no longer limited to what happens at home.
In hospitals, when patients come in with traumatic injuries and drugs are also involved, it becomes much harder to treat them. She emphasized the need for hospitals to take drug use into account when responding to trauma cases.
This research is one of the first to explore the connection between drug use and accidental injuries on a national level. The team used death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database.
This database collects death certificate information from all U.S. states. The researchers studied accidental injury deaths from 2018 to 2023, focusing specifically on those related to drug use.
They grouped deaths by cause—drug-induced, alcohol-induced, and other reasons. Only drug-induced deaths were included in the main analysis, not alcohol-related deaths. They looked at opioids, recreational drugs, and prescription medications.
Between 2018 and 2023, there were 534,000 total deaths from accidental injuries. Of those, the number of drug-related deaths rose from 19.5% to 30.8%—a nearly 60% increase.
Middle-aged adults, especially those aged 35 to 44, were most affected. This age group accounted for more than half (51.4%) of all drug-related accidental injury deaths during the five-year period.
The study also found significant racial and gender disparities. Black Americans had the highest mortality rates from drug-related injuries, making up 34.9% of the total deaths in this category. When adjusted for age, men were found to die at twice the rate of women—38.4% compared to 15.6%.
Christina Shin, the lead author of the study and a medical student at the Medical College of Georgia, said it was shocking to see how quickly drug-related accidental deaths have risen. She emphasized the need for public health efforts to focus not only on overdose prevention but also on the increasing role of drug use in accidental injuries.
Data from the CDC shows that about half of all Americans take at least one prescription medication, and one in five uses more than one drug—either recreationally or for health reasons.
Shin stressed that the goal of the research is not to judge or blame people who use drugs. Instead, it’s about understanding how drug use is changing the patterns of accidental deaths so that better care and prevention strategies can be developed.
The study authors plan to continue their work by looking into why these trends are happening and how trauma and addiction care systems can work together to help at-risk patients.
If you care about mental health, please read studies about cannabis use disorder linked to increased risk of mental diseases and some mental health drugs can cause rapid weight gain.
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