A Rust Belt county in Pennsylvania with a population of just 318,000 reportedly has a higher drugs-death rate than New York City.
The Luzerne County coroner reported 137 fatal drug overdoses in 2015 – quadruple the rate in New York City with its population of nearly 8.5 million, NBC News reported.
The city of Wilkes-Barre, with a population of 42,000, is especially hard-hit – and has been dubbed "the most unhappy place in America," NBC News reported.
According to the news outlet, an influx of the powerful painkiller fentanyl, and the city's proximity to both New York City and Philadelphia has fueled the epidemic there.
"Twenty years ago, we might have 12 deaths we determined to be drug deaths," William Lisman, the Luzerne County coroner, told NBC News. "This year we are on track for 150 deaths . . . By our standards, it's off the charts."
One father who lost a son to a drug overdose last August decried the epidemic.
"We went to 14 funerals of my son's friends who died of addiction in just one year," Christopher Emmett told NBC News reported. "They're dropping like flies, every day."
According to The Daily Caller, other states also are seeing sharp increases in deaths from opioids overdose, including in:
- Wisconsin, where heroin overdoses killed 281 people in 2015, accounting for more deaths than car accidents and tripling the number of fatalities linked to heroin over figures for 2010.
- South Carolina, which had the biggest increase in the heroin death rate, up by 57 percent between 2014 and 2015.
- North Carolina, where heroin death rate rose 46 percent in that time period, while it rose 43.5 percent in Tennessee.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.