US Life Expectancy Falls For Second Straight Year

These are the 2016 numbers:

“Life expectancy in the U.S. fell for the second year in a row in 2016, nudged down again by a surge in fatal opioid overdoses, federal officials report Thursday.

“I’m not prone to dramatic statements,” says Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics. “But I think we should be really alarmed. The drug overdose problem is a public health problem, and it needs to be addressed. We need to get a handle on it.” …

Tens of thousands of Americans have died from opioid overdoses in recent years. A report released Thursday found drug overdoses jumped significantly in 2016 to more than 63,600, and more than 42,200 of them were attributed to opioids. In 2015, more than 52,400 deaths were attributed to overdoses, and 33,000 of them involved opioids.

The rate of drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids also jumped significantly, from 3.1 per 100,000 in 2015 and 6.2 per 100,000 in 2016.

“It’s just really dramatically increased,” Anderson says, noting the latest increase is “far and above greater than any of the one-year increases that we’ve seen to this point.” …”

In spite of all the rhetoric of the 2016 campaign, the preliminary 2017 numbers show the trend has continued. The opioid epidemic in White America, which is hammering the White working class, has gotten so bad that Vanguard America have made it a staple of their activism. More White people are dying from suicide and drug overdoses that interracial violent crime.

Note: I’ve explained in the past how the opioid epidemic is due to how we are swimming in economic and cultural liberty. R.R. Reno is thinking along the same lines at First Things.