text_1: Every day, four North Carolinians die from a medication or drug overdose.
text_2: Rep. Greg Murphy has been promoting his STOP Act, which would limit access to prescription painkillers, by saying that drug overdoses kill four people a day in North Carolina. That’s basically accurate (it’s 3.5 per day) but prescription pills alone are only responsible for 2 deaths a day – half of what Murphy said. However, there’s wide agreement in the scientific community that for such counts it makes sense to lump heroin and painkillers together (which cause 2.7 deaths a day) and some research has argued for including cocaine deaths, too. Even if his statistics are slightly inflated, Murphy’s general point – that opioid addiction is leading to multiple deaths per day in North Carolina – is correct.