In 1999, 6.1 per 100,000 americans died of drug overdose. In 2018, 21.7 per 100,000.

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For decades, life expectancy in the United States has been rising, as in other developed nations, a positive sign. But the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are alarming. Life expectancy overall in the United States fell for the second time in three years in 2017, driven largely by a surge in drug overdoses and suicide.

The data shifts, while seemingly small, are unusual, a sustained decline in expected life span at birth not seen in the United States since the years of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. Robert Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at the CDC, correctly observed: “The idea that a developed wealthy nation like ours has declining life expectancy just doesn’t seem right.” Something is wrong, and it is not a mystery. The United States is in the throes of a drug overdose crisis, while suicide rates are climbing — twin tragedies that, as CDC Director Robert Redfield put it, should be “a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.”

In 2017, the rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States was 9.6 percent higher than in 2016. There were 70,237 drug overdose deaths, or 21.7 per 100,000 people, compared with 6.1 in 1999. Especially worrisome, drug overdose deaths surged 16 percent from 2014 to 2017. The deaths are being driven by synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, sold on the street, often combined with heroin or cocaine, with or without the users’ knowledge.

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