You are more likely to die of an opioid overdose than in a car crash in the US for the first time in history, a new report reveals.
Amid the unrelenting opioid crisis, the National Safety Council found that the odds of dying of an overdose are one in 96, compared to one in 103 for a car crash, according to its analysis of 2017 death records.
This is the first time that drugs have surpassed cars as a likely killer of more Americans - though the odds of dying by suicide remain higher than either.
Heart disease remains the most likely killer - the odds are one in six that it will kill any given American - but the report underscores the ways that the opioid epidemic is directly impacting the way so many Americans live and die.
An American is now more likely to die of an opioid overdose than to be killed in a car crash, according to a new report from the National Safety Council
It's no secret that addictive opioids have had and are still having a devastating impact on the US.
For the last several years, hardly a week has gone by without a opioids making headlines.
Yet, ubiquitous as new facts and statistics on the crisis have become, the issue can feel like just that - distant numbers and figures, detached from the very real people whose lives and deaths they quantify.
And as those numbers the impact of the opioid crisis creeps more closely into more and more lives.
Last year, the American Psychiatry Association found that about one in three people know someone who is addicted to opioids.
And now, the drugs are the cause of a horrifying outsize number of deaths in the US.
For each American, the odds that they will die by opioids rather than any other possible cause are now better than one in 100.
To put that into context:
The odds of getting a flush - just a regular flush, not a straight or royal flush - in a game of five-card poker are one to 508.
That means that you are five times more likely to die of an opioid overdose than you are to get a flush in a card game.
If you're not a poker player, you can broaden that figure to your circle of friends.
A September survey found that the average person has 338 Facebook friends (though some estimates put the number closer to 155, and, granted, we only trust an average of four of them,
