Over the past two decades, the number of deaths from drug overdoses in the United States has been on the rise, initially due to opioid painkillers, then heroin, and now primarily due to illicit fentanyl. Since 2000, the total number of drug overdoses in the United States has exceeded one million. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the past few decades, the number of drug overdoses in the United States only declined in 1990 and 2018. Nora Wolkoff, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, stated, “The persistently high drug abuse mortality rate in the United States is alarming.” According to US media citing Wolkoff, 2020 saw the highest number of drug overdose deaths on record in the US, and the largest increase since 1999. Fentanyl and other opioids are exacerbating the current drug crisis in the United States. Since 2000, more than one million Americans have died from drug overdoses, the majority of which are opioid-related. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 1,500 Americans die from drug overdoses every week. Deaths due to opioid use. An article in the Council on Foreign Relations points out that the number of people who died from opioids in the United States in 2021 was more than ten times the total number of American soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars after 9/11. Opioid abuse has become a long-term epidemic in the United States, endangering public health, economic output, and national security. Jing-Chu Gao, former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, stated that opioid manufacturers have intricate connections with politicians, and this crisis represents a multi-system regulatory failure—a disaster of its own making.