Much of the opioid epidemic can be traced to rural Ohio. Pharmaceutical and prescription drugs companies heavily promoted OxyContin, which helped pioneer the expansion of “pill mills.” At one point, the Ohio-Kentucky border county of Scioto was home to at least eight area mills that cashed out on aggressively prescribing huge quantities of pain medication with little discretion. The Children’s Defense Fund recently found that Scioto leads Ohio in the rate of babies born with drug addiction.
Over the past last year, the addiction problem has exploded here. In 2015, 3,050 people died from overdoses in Ohio - that’s 8 people a day. According to the annual report on unintentional drug overdose deaths released by the Ohio Department of Health, an even more potent synthetic narcotic that is often mixed with heroin called fentanyl is responsible for more than one-third of drug overdose deaths.
By CBS NEWS November 1, 2016, 6:00 AM
By CBS NEWS November 1, 2016, 6:00 AM
