The pictures are chilling and heartbreaking: zombie-like adults passed out in the front seat of a car, overdosed on opioids, a small child belted into the infant seat in the back, safe from traffic accidents but not from his or her own parents.
America, in short, has an addiction problem. The statistics on deaths from drug overdoses collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—more than a half-million people between 2000 and 2015 alone—are so appalling that one would be almost grateful to find a journalistic takedown calling them into question. Since 1999, deaths involving heroin and prescription opioids in particular have quadrupled, to the point where they constitute six out of every ten deaths from drug overdoses.
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