While many in the U.S. have attacked China for its role in allowing COVID-19 to spread across the globe, China is also the primary source of another plague that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in recent years: Fentanyl.
Opioid and drug overdose deaths skyrocketed 200% in the U.S. from 2000 to 2014, and haven’t stopped increasing since. The country hit a record 63,600 deaths in 2016 and we crossed the 100,000 death threshold for the 12-month period following April 2020, with the majority of those deaths coming from synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
