The New York Times has a devastating story of one county in New Mexico that is dealing with a drug overdose epidemic.

From the NY Times:

Rio Arriba County, just north of Santa Fe, is a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape of juniper-dotted desert and mountain valleys populated mostly by Hispanics who proudly trace their lineage to settlers of the 1600s — and who, a decade ago, discovered that their county had the nation’s highest per capita rate of deaths from overdoses. Hundreds of families are struggling to live with a multigenerational plague of narcotics; Mr. Lucero’s own son is addicted.

Federal data released in March showed that the county ranked first in drug fatalities for 2001 to 2005, with a death rate of 42.5 per 100,000, compared with a national average of 7.3.

Read the whole article here.

In the United States, $65 billion is spent on illegal narcotics.