The opioid overdose crisis has become a catastrophe. Every seven minutes, someone in the United States dies from a preventable drug overdose. Every twenty seconds, someone else is arrested for a drug-law violation. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recorded 81,000 overdose deaths between June of 2019 and June of 2020, an all-time annual high. COVID-19 is killing us in more ways than we realize.
Colorado isn’t doing much better than the rest of the nation. The entire state normally sees around a thousand drug users die from overdoses every year, but throughout 2020 we averaged more than 110 overdose deaths every month. We can’t keep blaming the dealers, the pharmacies or the users. This overdose crisis falls squarely on the shoulders of those who made sure it would persist: the uninformed, or just plain cold-hearted, politicians who continue to ramp up violence against a group of people who are dying en masse. And it is their constituents who let them get away with it, people