Posted November 30, 2018
A new CDC report titled, “Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 1999-2017,” reveals there in 2017 there were a staggering 70,237 drug overdose deaths in American. This represents a 9.6 percent increase from 2016 statistics. Perhaps most alarming, the rate of death from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl increased 45 percent between 2016 and 2017. When the 2017 totals are added to overdose statistics from 1999-2016, during which 200,000 died from synthetic opioid overdose, about 230,000 have succumbed to this pharmaceutically-induced epidemic — about 4 times the U.S. casualties of the entire Vietnam War conflict (58,220 deaths). Read more.