The statistics are numbing. Drug overdoses killed 64,070 people in the U.S. in 2016 – more than the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The death toll was up 21 percent over 2015, and all indications are it will be even higher when the 2017 numbers are determined, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Overdoses are more than an epidemic; they’re a national crisis.
If you dig a little deeper, you’ll see the scope of the problem expands. Opioid overdoses killed 42,249 Americans in 2016, and the fastest growing cause of overdose deaths is the use of synthetic opioids – the most common of which is fentanyl. These drugs are especially dangerous, resulting in 20,145 deaths in 2016 — more than double the total from 2015, according to the CDC. In fact, the rate of fatal overdoses from synthetic opioids other than methadone has increased an average of 88 percent each year since 2013. In 2016, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported more than 30,000 seizures of fentanyl, up from just 5,000 in 2014.