In 2016, about 70 percent of fatal overdoses involving fentanyl or heroin involved another drug as well, and roughly 74 percent of fatal overdoses involving cocaine also involved one or more other drugs. “We’ve had a tendency to think of these drugs in isolation," Dr. Holly Hedegaard, lead author of the report, told HuffPost. It’s not really what’s happening,” said Dr. Holly Hedegaard, lead author of the report and injury epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics. Overall, more than 63,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016, according to the report, which was prepared by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Oxycodone, which was the most common drug cited in fatal overdoses in 2011, was eclipsed by heroin from 2012 to 2015, and then fentanyl in 2016. On average, in each year from 2013 to 2016, the rate of overdose deaths from Fentanyl increased by about 113 percent a year. As an example, roughly 40 percent of people listed as dying of a cocaine overdose also had fentanyl in their system. In 2016, the street drugs fentanyl, heroin and cocaine were most frequently recorded in unintentional fatal overdoses, while prescription and over-the-counter medicines, including oxycodone, diphenhydramine, hydrocodone and alprazolam, were most frequently recorded in deaths by suicide.
– Fentanyl killed 18,335 people in the US in 2016—the most of any drug, making the synthetic opioid the deadliest drug in America. Health officials announced the new ranking of overdose deaths from 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, on Wednesday. It's fentanyl's first time atop the list, which had heroin in the No. 1 spot from 2012 to 2015, USA Today reports. Oxycodone held the top spot in 2011. Fentanyl has experienced a disturbingly fast rise, causing just 4% of overdose deaths in 2011—but 29% in 2016. On average, the rate of fentanyl OD deaths increased by 113% per year from 2013 to 2016. Of note, as the Huffington Post reports, is the fact that most OD deaths involved multiple drugs; of the fatal ODs involving fentanyl or heroin, 70% involved at least one other drug as well, and about 40% of cocaine deaths also involved fentanyl. Read on for the top 10 deadliest drugs in the US: