GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — They were strangers on earth, but dozens of people who died in 2015 will be forever connected by the way their lives ended.
At least 84 of the recorded 109 fatal drug overdoses in Kent County in 2015 were due to opioids like morphine, methadone, fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone and heroin. They are the drugs at the center of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called an “epidemic” of overdoses.
In 2015, opioids killed more than 33,000 people in the United States, more than any year on record, according to the CDC.
Michigan ranks tenth nationally per capita for opioid-based prescriptions, and eighteenth for the number of overdose deaths.
A LOOK AT VICTIMS OF THE OPIOID CRISIS
For six months, Target 8 has been examining records, piecing together the tapestry of lives lost to prescription painkillers and heroin in metro Grand Rapids in 2015.
Among them were a 20-year-old Grand Rapids Community College students who first tried painkillers with friends as a teen, a 24-year-old man whose got hooked on pain meds after a snowboarding injury, a 25-year-old man who started experimenting with pills and pot with friend in his teen years and a 30-year-old mom who — according to an aunt — began experimenting early in life in an effort to escape a tough childhood.
All four of them died from heroin overdoses.
The youngest victim that year was a 10-month-old Sparta boy, who died after accidentally swallowing one of his grandma’s morphine pills.
The oldest was a 70-year-old nursing home patient and long-time chronic pain sufferer, who died from a mixture of fentanyl and oxycodone — both powerful painkillers.
It was a fentanyl overdose that caused a 29-year-old husband and father to stop breathing.
A 33-year-old man also died from a fentanyl overdose. He was trying to manage pain from a recent surgery and had warned his surgeon that he had a history of addiction.
A 46-year-old woman died from a methadone overdose. She had started on the painkiller years before to treat migraines.
Full Story on WOODTV8