“More than 50,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, the highest figure ever.
33,000 gun deaths, 62% of those were suicides. Many more were justified police shootings, still others were accidental. A far minority were homicides.
The tally has been pushed to new heights by soaring abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers, especially fentanyl.
Heroin deaths rose 23 per cent in a year, to 12,989, slightly higher than the number of gun homicides, according to government data released yesterday.
The total number of gun deaths – which included suicides and accidents – rose seven per cent to 36,252.
It comes only days after another report which showed fentanyl, a synthetic opiate which is 40 times stronger than heroin, has become the largest drug threat to the United States, and causes 44 deaths every day.
Deaths from fentanyl rose 73 per cent to 9,580.
Overdoses – often accidental – of Oxycontin and Vicodin killed 17,536, an increase of four per cent.
‘I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this. Certainly not in modern times,’ said Robert Anderson, who oversees death statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
By comparison, the number of people who died in car crashes was 37,757, an increase of 12 per cent.”
By Chris Summers For Mailonline and Associated Press
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