Opioid Epidemic Part Of Decades-Long Rise in Drug Overdoses

Drug overdoses kill close to 200 people everyday in the United States. And while opioids are a major contributor to those deaths today, a new analysis of nearly 600,000 accidental drug overdose deaths between 1979 and 2016 reveals the current crisis is part of a much larger trend. "We think of [the current epidemic] starting in the '90s, but that was gas on the flame," said Robert Pack, a public health expert at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, who was not involved in the