Of the estimated 292 million users of illegal drugs worldwide in 2022, 60 million were taking opioids like morphine, codeine or heroin. This places the group second next to cannabis with an estimate of 228 million users, according to the latest United Nations World Drug Report. While cannabis usage may be more widespread and the risk of addiction is low, but present, consuming marihuana doesn't result in overdose deaths - contrary to the far more potent and therefore dangerous opioids. As our chart based on CDC data shows, synthetic opioids like fentanyl in particular have become the main reason for the increase in drug overdose mortality.
Out of the roughly 108,000 registered cases of deaths by overdose in 2022, almost 74,000 were directly related to synthetic opioids, the most prevalent of which is fentanyl. The drug is said to be 50 times more potent than heroin and is easy and cheap to manufacture since it's not tied to a crop base like more traditional opioids like heroin. The picture gets even more dire in the age bracket of 15 to 24. Here, 81 percent of the 6,696 overdose deaths can be ascribed to synthetic opioids, with the connected cases increasing fivefold between 2015 and 2022.
Globally, usage of opioids has been relatively stable since 2019, with reported users even going down from 62 million in the year before the coronavirus pandemic. According to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the global prevalence percentage stood at 1.2 for 2022, with only three regions clocking in significantly higher at percentages of 3.2 (Near and Middle East/South-West Asia), 2.7 (North America) and 2.0 (Australia and New Zealand).
