DEATH DON’T HAVE NO MERCY IN THIS LAND –
Sept. 12, 2023 – Counties with the highest average doses of legal pain pills per person from 2006 to 2013 suffered the highest death rates in the nation over the subsequent six years.
Annual overall overdose deaths reached a grim milestone in 2021, surpassing 100,000 for the first time in U.S. history. More than 110,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2022, two-thirds of whom succumbed to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We created a huge cohort of people dependent on opioid pills and when we pulled back on those, we created a heroin wave — and that quickly got replaced by fentanyl, and then people really started dying,” said Daniel Ciccarone, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine who studies street drugs and overdose trends.
