When regulators do too little

Two decades after the FDA approved mass-market opioids, morgues are running out of room

A woman whose loved one died of an opioid overdose.
(Image credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

In Ohio, coroner's offices are running out of room to store bodies, so they've brought in refrigerated trucks. Deaths from overdoses of opioids, heroin, and synthetic painkillers have soared about 50 percent in just a year. The casualties are piling up in every state: Overdoses killed about 60,000 Americans in 2016, The New York Times reported this week. It's hard to put the scope of this ongoing, man-made disaster in proper perspective: Drugs are killing nearly twice as many Americans as gun violence. Terrorism? Not even close. We're losing people to overdoses at a rate equivalent to 20 9/11 massacres every year. In a lawsuit filed last week against five pharmaceutical companies, Ohio joined more than a dozen other states and cities that have charged that drugmakers deliberately used a deceptive marketing campaign to turn powerful opioids into a mass consumer product. Purdue Pharma, it's been shown, told doctors the risk of addiction to OxyContin was "less than 1 percent."

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William Falk

William Falk is editor-in-chief of The Week, and has held that role since the magazine's first issue in 2001. He has previously been a reporter, columnist, and editor at the Gannett Westchester Newspapers and at Newsday, where he was part of two reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes.