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On the Government of Canada website under the title, Opioid-related Harms, more than 13,900 apparent opioid-related deaths occurred between January 2016 and June 2019 — that’s one every 2 hours.
In this BuzzFeed News post called, This Was The Decade Drug Overdoses Killed Nearly Half A Million Americans, author Dan Vergano, December 6, 2019, writes:
“Prince. Tom Petty. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor. Maybe someone you knew or loved.
“All gone, among the 467,000 drug overdose deaths in the US counted so far this decade, with another 67,000 more that will likely be added to that staggering total when this year ends.
“The epidemic has overtaken both car crashes and gun violence as leading causes of deaths nationwide, and it now causes far more deaths every year than AIDS did at its peak.
“US drug overdose deaths in this decade exceed the number of battle deaths the country suffered in World War I and World War II combined.”