Dramatic GIF Shows How America's Drug Deaths Spiked In Just 10 Years

The War on Drugs has largely failed in the U.S.

In addition to incarceration rates shooting up and leading to severely overcrowded prisons, drug deaths have steadily increased during the past 10 years.

A GIF posted to Reddit by Metric Maps uses data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to show how the rate of drug-induced deaths changed by state from 1999 to 2010.

Just about every state sees an increase:

Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas fare pretty well compared to other states, but some states like Ohio start off low and then see their drug deaths skyrocket.

The drug-induced death rate accounts for fatalities in which drugs are the underlying cause - including overdoses and deaths from medical conditions caused by chronic drug abuse. Illegal drugs, prescription drugs, and over-the-counter drugs are all counted, but alcohol is not.

Most of the drug deaths represented in the rates are unintentional overdoses, which have increased sharply over the past decade, the CDC notes. This is largely attributed to prescription painkillers, which Americans have increasingly gotten hooked on since they became popular throughout the 1990s.