The original numbers were startling enough — 30 heroin overdoses across Cincinnati in a single weekend.
Then they just kept climbing.
Seventy-eight more overdoses and at least three deaths were reported during a 48-hour period Tuesday and Wednesday.
And at the end of last week, after a six-day stretch of emergency-room visits that exhausted first responders and their medical supplies, the overdose tally soared to a number health officials are calling “unprecedented”: 174.
The direct cause for spike was a “toxic” product on the streets that combined heroin with carfentanil — an elephant tranquilizer. And Cincinnati isn’t the only crisis point:
In the same time period of the Cincinnati overdoses, 13 were reported last Tuesday in Jennings County, Ind., last Tuesday, 12 were reported on Wednesday in Montgomery County, Ky., and 29 overdoses linked to free samples of heroin, marked with a Batman symbol, were reported between Tuesday and Thursday in Camden, N.J.
That comes after 27 people overdosed during a five-hour period Aug. 15 in one West Virginia town.
When the history of our times is written, I suspect that our unusual presidential race could end up little more than a footnote. The main story is our cultural and spiritual unraveling. In some communities Americans are killing themselves. In others, they’re killing each other:
Tavon [Tanner] was among more than 400 people shot in Chicago this month. There have been at least 78 homicides, marking August as the most violent month in the city in almost 20 years, according to data provided by the Chicago Police Department. And there are two more days to go.
The city hasn’t seen a deadlier month since October of 1997, when there were 79 homicides. For the whole year, the count was 761, according to department numbers.
Chicago has recorded 487 homicides and more than 2,800 people shot so far this year, compared to 491 homicides and 2,988 people shot all of last year, according to Tribune data.
These are stunning numbers, and they’re yet more indication that our nation is squandering a generation’s worth of progress on violent crime. Yes, I know drug overdoses and gangland murders represent different problems, but both problems are concentrated in communities that — for various reasons — are falling farther and farther behind an American upper-middle-class that’s never had a better life. There’s an existential crisis out there, one that is beyond mere politics. These are the signs.