Drug overdose deaths soar among American women

For many decades, drug abuse was a menace that mostly threatened the lives of men. In 1999, fewer than 1 in 25,000 adult women in the United States died of a drug overdose, and childbirth was twice as deadly.

No more. Drug overdoses have become a prodigious thief of female lives in the U.S. And they are increasingly claiming women’s lives deep into middle age, according to a report Friday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Of the 70,237 fatal drug overdoses in the United States during 2017, 18,110 of the victims were women between the ages of 30 and 64, records from the National Vital Statistics System show. That’s up from 4,314 in 1999.