Opioid addiction and death mail-ordered to your door

Every day more than a million packages enter the US from abroad through the postal service. As state and federal governments crack down on legally prescribed opioid medication, addicts and dealers are looking to the dark web and the US mail as a new way to acquire increasingly potent - and deadly - drugs.

Van Ingram's voice cracks as he describes the toll opioid drug abuse has exacted on his home state of Kentucky.
"I go to bed thinking about those 1,400 people we lost in 2016 every night," he says. "Thinking about it every day when I get up. It's somebody's son, somebody's daughter, somebody's mother, somebody's father, somebody's sister, somebody's friend. The human toll is just unimaginable."
Ingram, who was speaking to the BBC for a World Service documentary on Donald Trump's healthcare record, has served as the executive director for the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy since 2004. Before that, he spent more than two decades as a police officer. He's witnessed first-hand the rise of the opioid drug problem in his state - considered "ground zero" for the epidemic.
It started with doctors - some well-meaning, others operating "pill-mills" looking to turn a quick profit - prescribing opioid painkillers to their patients. Medication was offered a month's supply at a time for one-time injuries and chronic pain, often to treat years of working in physically arduous jobs - like those in manufacturing and the coal mines of the eastern part of the state. The kind of jobs that have been disappearing across the US in recent years.

Source: Yahoo News