The heroin epidemic is taking the lives of a countless number of Americans, and the number increases each day because people don’t know how to prevent it.

The New York Times article “Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View” by Katharine Q. Seelye shows the severity of this number. Seelye wrote, “Nationally, 125 people a day die from drug overdoses, 78 of them from heroin and painkillers, and many more are revived, brought back from the brink of death — often in full public view.”

This ridiculously high number of deaths should be a wake up call, but instead, people feed the addiction. Kids as young as 15 years old have died from heroin overdoses in the past year, and it all started with pain killers.

Jamie Forzato wrote in the article “Dealing death: The heroin epidemic,” “Detectives say more kids with sports injuries are being prescribed pain medications and some are getting hooked… Some doctors are even landing in jail.”

Not only is the addiction being started young, but opioids have become insanely cheap- cheap enough for a kid to use his allowance on it. Forzato wrote, “One bag of heroin costs less than $10… But heroin is more potent than ever — from a 3 to 5 percent purity level 40 years ago, to about 90 percent today.”

Some states, such as New York and Connecticut, have had an unimaginable increase in deaths from synthetic opioids in the hundredth percent. In the CNN article “Deaths from synthetic opioids up 72%, CDC says,” Debra Goldschmidt wrote, “New York was hit hardest, with a 135.7% increase from 2014 to 2015. Nearby Connecticut saw a 125.9% increase, and Illinois had a 120% increase in deaths from synthetic opioids.”

The heroin epidemic is not going anywhere unless people are aware of the warning signs of drug abuse, and aware of how addiction begins.