The article is talking about deaths by Nov 2020 compared to Nov 2021 when there was an accessible effective vaccine. Parent comment is talking about increase of deaths from 2019 to 2020. I don't see the applicability of that quote. (Maybe OP and you and me are all off topic, but here we are.)
[0] has no statistics on opioid deaths.
[1] says that the deaths were going to be higher in Vermont, at (a projected) 200 deaths for the year vs 157 for the previous. That's maybe meaningful, but isn't limited to the age group the post parent was discussing.
[2] Does not have year over year statistics to compare against. Just that it was the worst, and is drawing on a smaller sample size than [1].
If (and this kind of seems like a big if) Vermont is representative of the rest of the US, *and* the age group he was discussing then maybe you have one source that supports your claim that a large portion of the deaths are from additional opioid deaths.
On the other hand assuming the root of the increase of all cause mortality between 2019 and 2020 among adults is mostly uncorrelated with the pandemic is a tough thing to convince me of. Can you please provide a source showing the national increase of opioid overdoses and suicide between 2019 and 2020 among the 20-40 age group?
Note I agree entirely that there were more overdose deaths in the US in 2020 than 2019 (that's easy to source https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...) what is hard is breaking it down into these smaller nuggets that we're discussing.
ETA: I couldn't find the original NY Times article grand-grand-grand... parent talked about that got us down this path, but this is pretty convincing that all cause mortality increased by at least 45% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7376843/