Shooting Towards the Precipice –
Aug 29, 2019 – In 2017, ten states accounted for one-third of all mentions of synthetic opioid overdoses, despite making up a little more than one-tenth of the nation’s population. Conversely, almost three in ten states report synthetic opioid overdose death rates that are one-quarter of the national average of nine per 100,000. The math is simple and distressing: If the rest of the country had a synthetic opioid–involved death rate of half of New England’s in 2017, that would come to about 38,000 synthetic opioid–involved fatal overdoses. If this estimate held, Pardo told me, it would translate to almost 10,000 more synthetic opioid overdose deaths compared to 2017, or about a third more than the over 28,000 synthetic opioid overdose deaths (excluding methadone) that actually happened that year.
