“Ho used data from the Human Mortality Database and the World Health Organization Mortality Database to analyze rates of drug overdose deaths in 18 countries between 2003 and 2013. She found that overdose death rates in the U.S. are 3.5 times higher, on average, than those of the other 17 countries. The rates are nearly two times higher than in countries with the next highest numbers of drug overdose deaths-specifically “Anglophone” countries, like Canada, the U.K. and Australia, and Nordic countries, like Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Drug overdose mortality in America is an alarming 27 times higher than in Italy and Japan, which have the lowest rates of the countries analyzed.”
