By the end of the first decade of this century, a crisis was brewing across the eastern U.S.A., causing death and despair amongst a people reeling from economic distress. Fentanyl, a synthetic drug used as a painkiller as well as an anaesthetic, was drawing tens of thousands of people into an inescapable cycle of opioid addiction.
Spreading from Maine to Nebraska, fentanyl, in less than a decade, had replaced methamphetamine as the most overdosed drug in this region. According to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), “overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, which includes fentanyl, increased almost 47% from 2016 to 2017. Roughly 29,400 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids in 2017.”
The crisis had emerged in the major port cities along the East coast and spread rapidly through the states of New York, Ohio, Philadelphia and Kentucky and then across the mid-western states. Presently, almost half of the U.S. has come under the deadly grip of fentanyl even as fears of it rapidly spreading westward grows.
So severe is the scale of the crisis that the labour participation rate, which according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is stagnating at about 63% over the last five years, led the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, to comment:
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