According to a new report, more people die in America each year from heroin related drug overdoses than car crashes.
On February 2, President Obama announced a proposal to invest $1 billion of new funding in his FY 2017 budget proposal to target the epidemic of prescription opioid abuse and heroin use in America. As officials at The White House report, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that more Americans now die each year from drug overdoses than they do from motor vehicle crashes.
CDC reports show that opioids – a class of drugs that include prescription pain medications and heroin – were related to 28,648 deaths in 2014. Additionally, between 2002 and 2013, the number of heroin-related deaths in America almost quadrupled. My Brother’s Keeper is here to brief you on the details of the proposal and why this information about the heroin epidemic is relevant to Baltimore.