Our country used the COVID-19 pandemic to shut down our economy for a year and a half and demonize fellow citizens who were considered noncompliant or insufficiently serious about the virus and the measures ordered to arrest it. Even as vaccines became available and the virus became less severe and more contained, public health officials insisted that people must change their everyday lives to accommodate it. Meanwhile, another, more deadly public health crisis has been allowed to run unchecked.
Every single day, more than 100 people in America die from a drug overdose. In the past three years alone, drug-related deaths have increased by 31% , and have quadrupled since 1999 . And unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, this crisis directly affects our nation’s future generations — younger and otherwise healthy Americans. Indeed, one study found that, between 2015 and 2019, young people lost an estimated 1.2 million years of life due to drug overdoses.
Driven largely by illegal fentanyl, drug deaths are now the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 18 and 45. Let that sink in: In the United States today, a young adult is more likely to die from a drug overdose than he is of cancer, in a car accident, or by suicide. The most recent numbers should be setting off alarms: More than 100,000 people lost their lives to drug deaths in 2021 — to say nothing of other associated injuries, the familial and social destruction drugs cause, and the crime rates that typically follow them.
