Opinion: The statistics don’t capture the opioid epidemic’s impact on children
What happens to a child when his or her parent overdoses on opioids or other drugs?
The epidemic of drug overdose deaths is a national disaster. It claimed more than 64,000 lives in 2016, many of them by opioid overdoses. That’s far more than the number of deaths from HIV/AIDS in the peak year of 1995.
My comparing the opioid and HIV/AIDS epidemics isn’t just a matter of statistics. Among those of us who were involved in responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis, there is a sense of dismay. We are once again facing a public health crisis for which there is inadequate research, limited funding, and much public stigma. And just as happened in the
