The State With the Most Fentanyl Deaths

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 25, 9:30AM EST

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The State With the Most Fentanyl Deaths — © Thinkstock

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks drug overdose deaths. For the 12-month period that ended April 2021 (the most recent period covered), the figure was 100,306 drug overdose deaths, up 28.5% from the year before. Among the largest contributors to the figure was deaths from fentanyl. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), “Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 80-100 times stronger than morphine.” Many people who believe they have purchased heroin have actually purchased fentanyl, a primary cause of overdoses.

The DEA says the drug has a number of street names, including Apache, China Girl, China Town, China White, Dance Fever, Goodfellas, Great Bear, He-Man, Poison and Tango & Cash.

More Americans ages 18 to 45 were killed by fentanyl than any other cause in 2020, including suiсide, car accidents and COVID-19. No state has been left untouched by the fentanyl crisis, but in some states the crisis is worse and fatalities have skyrocketed in recent years.
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To determine the state with the highest rate of fentanyl fatalities, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the Fentanyl: The State We’re In report from advocacy group Families Against Fentanyl. The report uses data from the CDC on the total number of fentanyl-caused deaths by state from 2015 to 2021. We used the number of fentanyl deaths and five-year population data from the Census Bureau to rank the states by fentanyl fatalities per capita.

Fentanyl often has been used as a pain management treatment for cancer patients, but illicitly manufactured fentanyl is often mixed in with other narcotics and causes a high share of the drug overdose and fatality cases in the United States.

The number of fentanyl fatalities per capita over the past few years varies widely from state to state. A dozen states reported fewer than 20 fatalities per 100,000 residents from 2015 to 2021. Conversely, 12 other states reported more than 100 fentanyl-related fatalities per 100,000 during that same time. One state recorded over 200 deaths per 100,000.

The prevalence of fentanyl-related deaths has grown significantly in recent years. From 2015 to 2021, the number of fentanyl deaths increased by 547% in the United States overall. Additionally, all but one state for which there is data saw fentanyl deaths more than double in that period.

The state with the most fentanyl deaths is West Virginia. Here are the details:

Fentanyl deaths per capita, 2015 to 2021: 216.6 per 100,000
Total fentanyl deaths, 2015 to 2021: 3,937 (19th highest)
Increase in fentanyl deaths from 2015 to 2021: +430%
Population: 1,817,305

Click here to see all the states with the most fentanyl deaths.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.