Opioid Crisis Makes More Organs Available

May 18, 2018

(NBC) – America’s opioid epidemic has one sad upside: more organs available for lifesaving transplants, researchers reported Wednesday. Close to 14 percent of people who donated an organ in 2016 had died of a drug overdose, the team of experts reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. That compares to just 1 percent in 2000. The numbers still are not large. In 2000, 59 organ donors had died of drug overdoses, compared to 1,029 in 2016.