The US opioid crisis is real and deadly. Trumpcare could make it even worse. (Mic)

Thursday Mar 16th, 2017

Connie Petroski can't remember the exact moment her daughter, Jessica, went from being a sunny 17-year-old who loved dressing up for school dances and hanging out with her friends to a sullen, quiet 18-year-old alternating between falling asleep upside down on the toilet and getting into hysterical shouting matches with her mother.

"She just got with the wrong person and started with cocaine, and it just goes from there," Connie said in a phone interview. "It's just one drug after another and nothing ever gets strong enough, so that's when they turn to heroin."

Jessica is just one of the estimated 2.1 million Americans currently struggling with opioid addiction, and the epidemic is only getting worse. In 2015, the most recent year on record, opioids killed more than 33,000 people — a record. From 2014 to 2015, deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, the painkiller that was found to be responsible for the 2016 death of the singer Prince, rose by 75%. 

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