Horrifying numbers on drug overdoses

From Josh Katz in The New York Times Upshot:

How bad is this?

The Times estimates that 62,500 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016.
That’s 50% more than the deaths from AIDS in the peak year of the epidemic (41,699 in 1995).
It’s the worst single-year mortality event in 60 years, when 70,000 Americans died in the 1957 Asian flu pandemic.
It’s twice the number of annual US traffic deaths.
It’s four times the number of Americans killed annually by firearms.
The increase in deaths in 2016 — about 10,000 more than 2015 — is more than three times the total number of Americans who have been killed by terrorists since the morning of 2001/09/11.
Katz: “Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50.”
The estimated one-year increase from 2015 to 2016 is 19%. If that rate of growth were to continue — and surely it CAN’T — the annual deaths would double in about 3.7 years. The doubling time for the number of deaths is falling, meaning that epidemic is accelerating.

The drug overdose epidemic is a public health catastrophe in the same class as AIDS.

@Bill_Gardner