Covid and opioid deaths. Opioids are bad. To quote the lancet “Opioid overdose mortality rates are alarmingly high, but measures based on death counts alone do not fully capture the impact of this crisis as they do not account for the young age at which most opioid-related deaths occur…” (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...)

The particular article found opioid deaths lowered life expectancy by 0.67 years, which is a crazy number.

Drug overdose deaths finally seem to be trending down in 2024, but they are still elevated and awful.