Deaths from accidental opioid overdoses now top car accidents for the first time, according to a report from the National Safety Council.

“Data, collected in 2017, shows Americans have a one in 96 chance of dying from an opioid overdose. The probability of dying in a motor vehicle crash is one in 103,” reports Fox News.

“Opioid pain relievers are the most fatally abused drugs and they’re entirely legal. Roughly 60 people die every day as a result of overdoses from opioids – that’s 22,630 Americans,” Fox adds. “To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the size of the entire population of Auburn Hills.”

Death from opioid overdose still don’t come close to deaths by natural causes: heart disease (1 in 6), cancer (1 in 7), respiratory disease (1 in 27), or even suicide (1 in 88). But the far-left New York Times reports that while deaths from natural causes are decreasing, “deaths from preventable causes have ticked up, and the result is that Americans’ life expectancy has actually decreased over the past few years.”

The primary cause of this increase, according to the Times, is not pills like Oxycontin, but fentanyl, which is generally administered through a patch or intravenously.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made opioid death and addiction a cornerstone of his campaign. He was well ahead of both the media, his own Republican Party, and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, when it came to this issue.

Currently, the president is fighting to keep fentanyl out of America with additional border security, something Democrats and their media allies are fighting bitterly against, up to and including a partial shutdown of the government, which is now in its third week.

Earlier this week, Breitbart News reported on the amount of fentanyl stopped at the border last year.

“The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit revealed in a year-end report that in total, about 2,737 pounds of fentanyl were seized in Fiscal Year 2018.”

“The nearly 3,000 pounds of fentanyl is enough to kill about 600 million individuals, nearly twice the population of the U.S. where about 330 million residents live.”

According to National Safety Council’s grim death statistics, whatever is being stopped along our porous border is nowhere near enough. The problem is getting worse as Democrats party in Puerto Rico.

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.