Jan. 28, 2022 – According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country remains in the midst of the “third wave” of the opioid epidemic, exacerbated by the presence of fentanyl and, over the past few years, factors brought on by the pandemic.
“It’s gotten so much worse. We’ve surpassed the tipping point,” said Colleen Ronnei, the executive director of Minnesota non-profit Change the Outcome. “The CDC reported the most number of overdoses in a 12-month period ever, in the history of our country.”
Ronnei lost her 20-year-old son, Luke, to an accidental overdose in January 2016. Since then, CDC statistics show that overdose deaths in Minnesota have nearly doubled, reaching 1,187 from the period of June 2020 to June 2021. Nationwide, roughly 100,000 Americans died during that same time frame. “It has to be a broad approach. We can’t do it through law enforcement, can’t do it through the judicial system, can’t just treat our way out of it,” Ronnei said. “We’re getting better at it all the time, on multiple levels, but it’s a crushingly slow process. And it’s heartbreaking for me to know that every day, there is a young person in the state of Minnesota who is overdosing.”
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