Opioid Epidemic: Drug Overdose Alone Killed More Americans than 3 Wars Combined

• Death toll due to drug overdoses in America is at the peak with more 50,-000 deaths in the last year
• Drug overdose is the principal cause of death for Americans under 50
• The main reason for the death is the prescription of Opioid

June 23, 2017: Due to the Drug overdose in America, the number of deaths can shoot up to as many as died in Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, NYT reported.

For more than 100 years, the death rate was low but such is not the situation now. With the number of people doing drug overdose America is skyrocketing, the number of deaths is extremely harrowing and the main reason is the opioid endemic. The spread of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid is cheap and potent, which leads to overdoses.

More than 59,000 Americans died in 2016 of drug overdoses, Times investigation reported this month which is the largest annual jump in tolls ever recorded in the U.S.

NYT mentioned, there were more than 236 million prescriptions written for opioids in the United States last year — that's about one bottle of opioids for every American.

– prepared by Naina Mishra of Newsgram. Twitter: @Nainamishr94