The industrial town of Portsmouth in Southern Ohio is not the only Ohio city plagued by drugs like prescription painkillers. More people died of drug overdoses in Ohio in 2008 and 2009 than in the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, according to the article in the Times.

The article notes that the pattern we see now resembles that of the 1980s, when grandparents reared an entire generation of young people whose parents were addicts. Now those children have grown up to be addicts. Who’s to say that the pattern won’t continue? Who is going to raise this new generation of addicts’ children?

The severity of the problem is being seen by state and national government. Gov. John R. Kasich announced $36 million in new spending for new drug treatment and work readiness funds. The funds are designed to help people addicted to prescription drugs get treatment so they can go back to work. On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced plans to fight prescription drug addiction nationally, noting that it was now killing more people than crack cocaine in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined, according to the article.

In the moment, drugs may seem like a good idea. You live in a small town and there’s not a whole lot to do, so you and your friends decide to have some fun. The thousands of people who died of prescription drug overdoses were probably just having some fun the first time they chose to do drugs.

You think you are invincible; you think that you have control, but before you know it, you are one of the thousands of sad stories of kids who were lost to drugs. We can say that drugs are bad thousands of times, and it won’t make any difference. We can only hope that these devastating statistics will open some eyes, or at the very least, make people more cautious.