Tag: USA: Drug Overdose Deaths

NOVANEWS By Thomas L. Knapp  Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50, the New York Times‘s Josh Katz reports. In 2016, overdoses claimed somewhere between 59,000 and 65,000 lives. That’s more American lives than were lost in the Vietnam war. It’s 20 times the casualty count of 9/11. It’s half again as many deaths as attributed to the “gun violence” we hear so much about in its peak year, 1994. Katz pins the blame for these deaths on use, abuse, and sometimes accidental overdose of heroin, fentanyl, and prescription opioid painkillers. He goes along with the current fad of calling the phenomenon an “opioid epidemic.” That’s soothingly simple. The word “epidemic” implies an infectious agent to which we need attribute neither consciousness nor responsibilit...