I lost a friend last week. She was 42 years old, and it was a drug overdose. She was beautiful, smart, kind. I gave a eulogy at her funeral. Peering at her loved ones and our mutual friends through a wall of tears, I said she had been a burst of color in a gray world. She was a real person, and now she’s gone.

It wasn’t the first funeral I’ve attended for someone who had died this way, but she was the closest. It wasn’t even the second or the fifth. She was the second woman to overdose from just my small group of high-school friends.

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The opioid crisis has become personal for me. It is, among many other things, a crisis for American women my age.

CA report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a few weeks ago tells the bigger story: “Among women aged 30–64 years, the unadjusted drug-overdose death rate increased” 260 percent since 1999.

When I tell people about the loss, they nod their heads or tell me their own stories. People are dying from drug overdoses at a sky-high rate, and everyone knows someone who has been lost.

Opioids aren’t a crisis anymore; they are an epidemic. According to the CDC, “130 Americans die ­every day from an opioid overdose.” I’ve known too many of those Americans. Maybe you have too. They aren’t mere statistics.

(Excerpted from New York Post)