In 1999, two classmates asked me to the fifth grade dance. By 2009, both of them had developed opioid addictions. By 2019, one was sober, and the other was dead from a heroin overdose. The one who died left behind an infant son. “I never gave up on you,” my classmate’s mother posted on Facebook, “but you would not let me help you.” She chose a photo of him from around the time we slow-danced to the Aerosmith song from the Armageddon soundtrack.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention statistics on opioid overdose deaths start that same year, in 1999. Since then, nearly half a million Americans have died from overdoses on prescription and illicit opioids. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, and opioids are involved in two-thirds of them. Four out of five new heroin users are transitioning from misusing prescription opioids. More than one hundred people are now dying from opioid overdoses in the United States every day.

It’s well established now that the proliferation of prescription opioids, particularly the game-changing painkiller OxyContin, fueled the broader addiction epidemic. You can see the progression of the crisis in the data. The opioid deaths have come in three waves: first a rise in deaths from prescription opioids starting in 1999, followed by a rise in deaths from heroin overdoses beginning in 2010; then an explosion in deaths from dangerous synthetic opioids like fentanyl starting in 2013. For every person who dies, hundreds more are entangled in the criminal justice system, and thousands more are struggling with addiction as their lives fall apart.