In a Decade of Drug Overdoses, More Than 320,000 American Children Lost a Parent

(NPR) More than 320,000 children across the United States lost a parent due to a drug overdose between 2011 and 2021. That's according to a new study published in JAMA Psychiatry Wednesday.

"It's a call to arms to pay close attention to the consequences of a parent who dies due to a drug overdose," says Harvard neuroscientist Charles Nelson III, who wasn't involved in the new study.

The impact of the country's overdose epidemic on children is something "we really don't speak much about," says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and an author of the new study.

"The [overdose] numbers and mortality are so high that it attracts all of the attention and urgency to address it, to protect people from dying," she adds. "But at the same time, we've basically neglected to realize that when someone dies, there is a family that's left behind. And if the family has young children, that makes them very, very vulnerable."

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