The Painful Truth About America’s Opioid Addiction

Our Craving for Comfort and Our Broken Health Care System Are Fueling a Deadly Epidemic

Lisa Girion, a Reuters top news editor for the Americas and the moderator of a Zócalo/UCLA panel on America’s opioid addiction problem, opened the discussion with some startling statistics. “Over the last 15 years, more than 200,000 people have died of drug deaths in this country,” most due to prescription opioids but increasingly heroin as well, she said. “20 million people are currently addicted in this country to both legal and illegal drugs. Only 10 percent of them manage to get treatment.”

What is driving this problem and how can we …