Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overdosed actually overtook vehicle deaths before most public health officials realized that something horribly wrong was going on. That we still haven’t done much about it is deeply distressing, tbh. I feel it’s a sign that we’re losing the ability to act towards unified goals, even politically safe ones like “no more drug overdoses please”.
Stopping drug overdoses is far from a politically safe goal though, because you need to stop the war on drugs and take a less draconian approach, which goes directly against the hard-line stance of the Republican party.
Stopping drug overdoses is popular across the board, but some of the tactics to accomplish that are not. We aren’t even at step zero, pretending to give a shit at the national level.
You also need to factor in the victims, or rather their demographics. To be brutally honest, past victims of heroin were often minorities who lived in inner cities. Blacks in urban ghettos and gays cut off from all social support in particular, plus homeless people of all stripes. It was easy for people to pretend that those victims were simply immoral fools who got their just desserts.
Now the victims are increasingly the children of white, suburban, middle class families. This has brought the crisis much closer to the heart of American political power, and made it much easier for the average voter to know someone who is addicted to or died from opiates.
In theory this should reduce the drive for draconian drug war tactics, since the victims are neighbors and not brown boogeymen over in the big bad city. This doesn’t seem to be happening at the political level, which is weird and disconcerting.