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Fentanyl is driving up drug overdose deaths in the US but, in nearly half of the country, methamphetamine is the biggest killer, a new report reveals. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics, fentanyl was associated with nearly 39 percent of all drug overdose deaths in 2017. That's an increase from 2016 when fentanyl, the synthetic opioid 100 times stronger than morphine, was responsible for 29 percent of all fatal overdoses. The report is based on 2017 figures when there were more than 70,000 overdose deaths in the US, two-thirds of them involving opioids. However, there was a clear geographic divide. Fentanyl was most likely to be involved in fatal overdoses in eastern US states, while meth was the most likely to be linked to overdose in the western half of the nation ☠️