August has been a particularly horrific month for heroin overdoses.
These statistics are stunning.
In 2014, more Americans died of drug overdoses than any other year on record: more than 47,000 deaths in just one year, according to new federal data. That’s far more than the nearly 34,000 who died in car crashes, the almost 34,000 who died due to gun violence, and the nearly 42,000 who died due to HIV/AIDS during that epidemic’s peak in 1995.
It’s Getting Worse
In 2012, U.S. doctors wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers, accoding to Vox.com — “enough to give a bottle of pills to every adult in the country.”
Then, when policymakers realized America had an opioid problem and began to rein it in by pulling back access, “some instead moved to a lower-cost, more potent opioid, heroin, and some are reportedly moving to the even stronger opioid, fentanyl,” according to Vox.
However, in August, it was horrific.
In Cincinnati, there were 174 heroin overdoses in just six days last week—78 in two days alone.
Authorities believe the sudden spike is due to heroin being cut with carfentanil, an opioid boost that is a large-animal tranquilizer used on large animals and 100,000 times stronger than morphine.
The overdoses in Cincinnati were not the only ones.
In the same time period of the Cincinnati overdoses, 13 were reported last Tuesday in Jennings County, Ind., last Tuesday, 12 were reported on Wednesday in Montgomery County, Ky., and 29 overdoses linked to free samples of heroin, marked with a Batman symbol, were reported between Tuesday and Thursday in Camden, N.J.
That comes after 27 people overdosed during a five-hour period Aug. 15 in one West Virginia town.
Some are blaming the epidemic on drug companies for the getting America hooked on painkillers.
Others, however, blame (in part) the rise of heroin on the drug cartels’ reaction to the legalization of marijuana in certain states.
If you wonder why America is in the grips of a heroin epidemic that kills two hundred people a week, take a hard look at the legalization of pot, which destroyed the profits of the Mexican cartels. How did they respond to a major loss in revenue? Like any company, they created an irresistible new product and flooded the market.
Regardless of “who” is to blame, America’s got a heroin problem that is not getting any better. In fact, it’s getting much, much worse.
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