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The opioid crisis continues: Have you bolstered your health system’s drug diversion defenses yet?

After years of decline, 2020 and 2021 saw record rises in U.S. drug overdose deaths. In the 12-month period that ended in April 2021, more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, an increase of nearly 30% from the prior year, according to provisional figures reported by the National Center for Health Statistics. Opioids such as illegal synthetic fentanyl were linked with most of them.

In conversations with reporters last July, Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, noted, “This is the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period.”

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