There’s new federal legislation afoot aimed at reducing the nation’s rising tide of drug overdose deaths – unfortunately, yet another dubious distinction in which California is a leader.

Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., today rolled out the Drug Overdose Reduction Act – making $27 million per year available to cities, states, tribal governments and nonprofits to implement overdose prevention plans – even as the Drug Policy Alliance issued a new report on the problem. (At the moment, despite more than 20,000 U.S. overdose deaths per year, there’s no federal money dedicated to overdose prevention.)

Accidental drug overdose — from drugs both legal and illegal — now ranks second only to auto collisions among the leading causes of accidental deaths in the United States, according to the DPA, and California has the largest number of overdose deaths in the nation: 3,646 Californians died of overdose in 2006, or 10 people per day. In fact, overdose was the leading cause of accidental death for Californians ages 25-64 in 2006, surpassing even motor vehicle accidents, and is the second leading cause for all ages.

What’s fueling the increase? It may not be what you think. Here’s what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Congress last year:

“One might assume that the increase in drug overdose deaths is due to an increased use of street drugs like heroin and cocaine, because we have in the past associated such drugs with overdoses. However, in a paper published in 2006, the CDC drilled down to another level to look at the codes given to the specific drugs recorded on the death certificates through 2004. When these more specific drugs were tabulated, we found that street drugs were not behind the increase. The increase from 1999 to 2004 was driven largely by opioid analgesics [such as OxyContin and Vicodin], with a smaller contribution from cocaine, and essentially no contribution from heroin. The number of deaths in the narcotics category that involved prescription opioid analgesics increased from 2,900 in 1999 to at least 7,500 in 2004, an increase of 160% in just 5 years. By 2004, opioid painkiller deaths numbered more than the total of deaths involving heroin and cocaine in this category.”

And although the CDC said it’s not easy to project how things have gone in the last few years, what data it has available indicates “that the mortality statistics through 2005 probably underestimate the present magnitude of the problem.”

More, including a California elected official’s unique perspective, after the jump…

Dr. Donald Kurth, who is both the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s president-elect as well as Rancho Cucamonga’s mayor, told reporters on a conference call today that he himself almost died of a heroin overdose as a suburban New Jersey teenager in 1969. Through his decades of experience in emergency medicine and addiction treatment, he said, he “thought to myself over and over again, ‘This is so crazy’” that there’s no good system in place to intervene in addicts’ lives to prevent overdoses.

“We’ve got the science, we’ve got the technology and the medicine to do this,” Kurth said, yet despite a national overdose death toll “like a jumbo jetliner crashing every three days,” the United States “as a nation hasn’t had the political will to let physicians use what’s already available.”

Singled out for praise in the DPA report is California’s Overdose Treatment Liability Act, signed into law in late 2007 to create a three-year pilot project in seven counties – including Alameda and San Francisco – authorizing overdose prevention programs and protecting providers who prescribe take-home naloxone, a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses.