A new survey reveals that nearly a third of all US adults know someone who has died of a drug overdose.
The survey results underscore the tremendous scale of the US drug crisis.
Over 2,000 adults were interviewed for the survey, with 32% saying they’ve suffered the loss of somebody they knew to a fatal overdose. Extrapolated to the total US population, that’s 83 million people at a single remove from a drug-overdose death.
Nearly 19% of participants, or 49 million adults nationwide, said the person who died was a family member or close friend.
Unsurprisingly, poorer people were more likely to be affected, with 40% of people from households making less than $30,000 a year saying they’d lost someone to an overdose.
The crisis has not left the better-off untouched, however: 26% of Americans earning over $100,000 a year say they also knew someone who died as a result of drugs.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over a million people have died of drug overdoses in the US since the 1990s. More than 100,000 people die each year of drug overdoses. The problem has become significantly worse with the rise of prescription opioids such as oxycontin and black-market opioids such as fentanyl.
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