The death of Tyler Skaggs is truly unfortunate. Unique in the fact that he was a Major League Baseball player, but also a sign of the times in that over 70,000 people died from opiate drugs in 2017, the last year with clear data. Currently, over 130 people die each day in America from opiate overdoses.
In a super competitive landscape in which physical exertion is the means to fame and fortune, it makes sense that professional sports would be a place for the opiate epidemic to spread. Stories of football players “taking a needle” before a game have been commonplace for decades.