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United States military operations in Afghanistan, now in their 15th year, are routinely described as America’s longest war. For overseas combat, that is true. But nothing tops the domestic “war on drugs” that an American president declared more than four decades ago. The casualty rate has been exceedingly high. Nearly 44,000 Americans a year — 120 a day — now die of drug overdoses. Neither traffic accidents nor gun violence, each claiming 30,000-plus lives a year, causes so much ruination. The annual drug toll is six times the total of American deaths in all wars since Vietnam. (Haberman, 11/22)

As the opioid epidemic has exploded in small towns and suburbs in recent years, officials have scrambled to put naloxone in the hands of drug users’ families and friends, and to make it more widely available by equipping police officers with the drug. At the same time, thousands of lives are being saved by giving the antidote to drug users. More than 80 percent of overdose victims revived by “laypeople” were rescued by other users, most of them in the past few years, according to one national survey published in June. (Bernstein, 11/22)

Thirty-five states saw youth drug overdose deaths increase dramatically in the past decade, according to a new report. And in five states – Kansas, Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Wyoming – the overdose death rates more than quadrupled. Drug overdoses were the leading cause of injury death in 2013, exceeding that of motor vehicle crashes, says the report released Thursday from Trust for America's Health, a national non-profit group that watchdogs public health issues. (Thadani, 11/20)