Way more people are dying from overdoses than terrorism in the U.S.
Feb 8, 2017, 6:35 AM | Updated: 10:08 am
One of the promises that put President Donald Trump in the White house was his promise to deal with the opioid epidemic. And on Tuesday, at a gathering of local sheriffs at the White House, he pledged to make it a priority.
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In a speech last October, President Trump guaranteed not only to stop drugs from pouring into the country but to help every seriously addicted person to get the assistance they need.
The problem is opioids. One of the cities, where it’s especially bad, is Cleveland, Ohio, where Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination. It’s also where CBS’s DeMarco Morgan talked with Camelia Carter, whose son was among the 517 overdose deaths in Cuyahoga County last year.
“My son was found dead in a home on the west side of Cleveland and he was pronounced dead on May 29 at 1:05 p.m.,” Carter explained.
“The pandemic is devastating the very fiber of this country,” she added. “If this were the flu, our county would be under quarantine.”
So far this year there have been another 70 deaths in Cuyahoga County — almost all of them from a powerful opioid known as Fentanyl. It’s a statistic that hits home for Dr. Thomas Gilson, the county medical examiner. His brother-in-law died of an overdose.
“Last year, we saw an almost 100 percent increase in the total number of overdose deaths in our county alone,” Gilson said. “That’s a shocking number of people.”
“Heroin is about four-to-five times the potency of morphine. Fentanyl is about 100 times the potency of morphine.”
And now there is a new kind Fentanyl — Carfentanil — which is 100 times more powerful than Fentanyl.
Cleveland is responding by distributing Naloxone, which can quickly reverse an overdose, and the president has promised to support those efforts.
“We’re going to expand access to abuse-deterring drugs…” he said.
And that help can’t come soon enough. Ninety-one American are dying from overdoses every day. That’s more than are dying in traffic accidents and way more than are dying from terrorism.
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