The number of people who have used heroin has increased almost five-fold since 2001 and the number of people who abuse heroin has approximately tripled since then, according to a new study.
The numbers are startling -- in 2015, 52,404 people died from drug overdoses according to the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sixty-three percent of those deaths involved an opioid.
More people die from drug overdoses than from guns or car accidents. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 1995, 43,115 people in the United States died from the disease.
