In 2017, the US Centers for Disease Control published its estimate of the total number of deaths due to drug overdose in the United States.
It found that 58,525 people died from drug overdoses in the 12 month period ending in July 2016. For the following year, the number climbed to 66,972.
Those are horrifically large numbers. They are so large, in fact, that they total almost 14 percent of the total number of American who die annually due to cigarette smoking.
Or to put it another way, in 2017 as many people died from cigarette smoking every 51 days as died from drug overdoses the entire year.