In the past decade, the opioid crisis has tightened its grip on communities across the United States.
More than 80,000 people have died of overdoses involving opioids in 2022, almost quadruple the total in 2010.
Most experts place the start of the crisis in the 1990s when millions of patients began receiving prescriptions for powerful painkillers like OxyContin. Around the mid-2010s, a synthetic opioid, illicit fentanyl, started to spread. Fentanyl is easier to produce than heroin and up to 50 times as potent, making it much easier for people to take too much accidentally.
Read what Rotary clubs are doing to prevent accidental overdose deaths and combat the crisis.