evidence: What came next was a stream of increasingly more potent drugs, causing overdose fatality numbers to spike in Kentucky and across the US. By last year, more Americans had died from opioids than in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. More Americans die annually from the drugs than are killed in car accidents or firearm incidents. Of the 63,630 recorded drug overdose deaths in the US in 2016, 42,249 were from opioids. [...] Nationally, from 2014 to 2015, the number of fentanyl-related overdose deaths increased by 72%, to nearly 10,000. In 2016, that number had doubled, to 20,100. "Emerging year-over-year figures and episodic outbreaks of fentanyl-related deaths paint a grim picture of an uncontained, plague-like contagion," write Professors Leo Beletsky and Corey Davis in a paper on the fentanyl crisis published last year in the International Journal of Drug Policy.