Drug overdose deaths spiked almost 22 percent in New Jersey last year, the state Medical Examiner's Office reported Wednesday, largely due to opioids.
The finding is almost identical to the 23 percent increase in deaths in Pennsylvania that the local division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reported several months ago.
In some ways, however, the latest data are even more disturbing: While Pennsylvania overdoses have been rising continuously for years, in New Jersey they had held steady for a couple of years and even seemed to be declining slightly. National data are not available yet, but a number of other states had also experienced plateaus in drug deaths that turned out to be temporary.
