Tracking U.S. drug overdose deaths
At least 107,422 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. between April 2022 and March 2023, more than double the 52,404 deaths in 2015. Of those, 631 deaths were in San Francisco County and 11,403 in California.
San Francisco County
Updated Nov. 8, 2023 1:24 p.m.
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Drug overdoses have killed more than a million people in the U.S. since 1999, with the majority of the fatalities driven by opioids, including the supremely powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl.
But while the accelerating casualties are vast — so much so that they are driving down the nation’s life expectancy — the suffering is not evenly spread, with some cities and counties recording death tolls three to five times higher than the national average, according to a first-of-its-kind tracker of the epidemic.
“Even in the era of COVID-19, the opioid crisis stands out as one of the most devastating public health disasters of the 21st century in the USA and Canada,” states a report by the Stanford Lancet Commission finding that the crisis was fueled by “unrestrained profit seeking and multi-level, multi-system regulatory failure.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/us-drug-overdose-deaths/
