November 11th, 2017 by WCBC Radio

The Baltimore Sun reports that among the disturbing new data released recently by health officials about drug and alcohol overdose deaths in Maryland in the first half of the year: There were 325 deaths linked to cocaine in Maryland between January and June. To be sure, opioids, particularly heroin and its more powerful synthetic relative fentanyl, kill far more people. And alcohol is also still a bigger killer. But cocaine, an old foe of drug treatment professionals, remains a problem despite the diminished attention from the media and policy makers. The deaths mean that 27.7 percent of people who’ve died of an overdose so far had cocaine in their system, according to the latest data available for Maryland. The deaths are up from 207 during the same period in 2016, and up from 104 in the same time in 2015. That’s more than three times the deaths in three years.