At the Netroots Nation conference in Atlanta, Georgia this year, co-founder Stephanie Taylor moderated a panel on the drug epidemic called ai???Letai??i??s Talk About Drugs: The Opioid Epidemic and Why It Should Be a Core Political Issue for Democrats.ai??? Panelists included Cathy Glasson, a registered nurse running for Governor of Iowa, as well as West Virginia union activist Sammi Brown and Tom Perriello, the former congressman from Virginia who now runs Win Virginia, a group focused on the 2017 state elections.

The panelists discussed both the scale of the crisis, and some key electoral data points.

Facts About Scale:

From 2000 to 2015 more than half a million people died from drug overdoses. 140 people are estimated to die from drug overdoses every day, and about two-thirds of those deaths are linked to opioids.1

In 2015, the five states with the highest rates of death due to drug overdose were West Virginia (41.5 per 100,000), New Hampshire (34.3 per 100,000), Kentucky (29.9 per 100,000), Ohio (29.9 per 100,000), and Rhode Island (28.2 per 100,000).2

In 2016, drug overdoses killed more Americans in one year than the entire Vietnam War. One forecast predicted that 650,000 more people will die from opioid overdoses in the next 10 years.3

Facts About Electoral Impact:

A recent Penn State study found Trump overperformed the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates.4

Ohio: 6 of the 9 Ohio counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican in 2016 logged overdose death rates far above the national rate of 14.7 people per 100,000. Nearly every Ohio county with an overdose death rate above 20 per 100,000 saw voting gains of 10% or more for Trump compared with Romney and/or drops of 10% or more for Hillary Clinton compared to President Barack Obama in 2012.5

29 of 33 Pennsylvania counties with overdose death …