‘It’s like 9/11 every three weeks’

The overall human cost of the US opioid catastrophe is staggering in its scale, writes Marion McKeone

Families who have lost loved ones to the opioid crisis protest in front of Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, where the state’s attorney general was taking a suit against Purdue Pharma last monthGetty

Between 1999 and 2017, more than 700,000 people in the United States died from drug overdoses. Of these deaths, some 400,000 were caused by opioid overdoses, and of these, an estimated 200,000 were caused by opioid tablets that were prescribed by doctors.

The opioid epidemic is a crisis that continues to spiral. US health agencies like the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) and the National Institutes ...