With increasing numbers like that, it's no surprise that drug overdose deaths in 2016 most likely exceeded 59,000, which is the largest annual jump in the United States ever. It can be 50 to 100 times as potent as morphine.
In 2015, there were 52,404 drug overdoses in the US.
It pointed to several cases in which police officers experienced extreme reactions after inadvertently touching or inhaling fentanyl-spiked drugs.
'The spread of fentanyl means that any encounter a law enforcement officer has with an unidentified white powder could be fatal, ' said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a DEA event.
Drug deaths in the US rose at the steepest rate ever to the highest level in recorded history in 2016, claiming more than 60,000 lives, and early data suggest deaths from opioids and other drugs will continue to increase in 2017. That's an increase over the previous year of 19 percent, a record. The Massachusetts Department of Health notes that while deaths related to heroin-only declined, fentanyl-linked deaths rose, mirroring the DEA's findings that traffickers have expanded the market.
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Priyanka Chopra is busy promoting her upcoming Hollywood film Baywatch with her co-stars Zac Efron and Dwayne Johnson. The 14 percent could slide up or down, depending on how other critics react, once they've published their review.
This is not because fewer people use drugs there, but that the distribution of deadlier ones - especially fentanyl - is not as high.
This exponential growth in overdose deaths in 2016 didn't extend to all parts of the country. The number of deaths associated with fentanyl increased from 84 in 2014, or 35 percent, to 138 in the first nine months of 2016, or 56 percent.
Almost 11,000 of those who died of overdoses were white, non-Hispanic.
Since 1999, sales of prescription opioids in the United States have quadrupled.
Drug companies over six years shipped 780 million prescription pain pills to West Virginia, a state of less than two million, half of those came from the three largest USA drug companies: McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.
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