The overdose death rate among U.S. adolescents nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020 — a climb that continued into 2021, a new study in JAMA shows. Researchers determined that it’s not a surge of 14- to 18-year-olds using drugs – survey data actually indicate that fewer teens experimented with drugs during the pandemic. Rather, a main factor is the supply of increasingly deadly drugs, particularly fentanyl, which has driven overall overdose deaths to more than 100,000 per year and has now trickled down to adolescents.