Last week I wrote that more than 100,000 Americans die every year from drug overdoses in the United States. In the 12-month period ended in September 2023, 111,380 Americans had died. As recently as 2015 the number of Americans overdosing was less than half of recent figure.
Opioids, specifically fentanyl, are most often the cause of overdose deaths. The RAND Corporation released a study that found that 42% of American adults personally know someone who died by overdose. Furthermore, of those four-in-ten adults who know someone who died of an overdose the average number of people they know who died is two.