More than 63,000 people died from a drug overdose last year – that’s more than the number of deaths caused by AIDS in 1995, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Between 2015 and 2016, the number of people who died from a drug overdose involving illicitly-manufactured fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, more than doubled.
Available data shows that heroin contaminated with fentanyl has largely driven the recent increases in opioid-related overdose deaths, Dr. Deborah Dowell from the CDC wrote in an article published this week in JAMA.
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