Dayton: Ohio, a bellwether for US elections in general and the Rust Belt in particular, has in the course of the past month become a single-issue state.
The field for next year's gubernatorial election has made it plain that the only issue in the state is the opioid epidemic that has killed thousands and touched candidates across the urban-rural and Republican-Democrat divide.
Ohio Attorney-General Mike DeWine, one of those candidates, announced on Tuesday that the state was suing five pharmaceutical manufacturers of opioid pain medication, the makers of pills such as Oxycontin and Percocet.
Many of these drugs were marketed as non-addictive alternatives to other pain medications. Doctors prescribed them under this assumption, according to DeWine, and the results are 25,000 dead in 2015 alone from opioid overdoses in the United States. In Ohio, 21,000 have died in 10 years.
Nan Whaley, the Democratic mayor of Dayton, and Jon Husted, Ohio's current Secretary of State, have both been hit by the epidemic personally.
"I wish I only knew one," Husted told the Dayton Daily News when he announced his candidacy in early May, declining further details.
Whaley announced her candidacy the same day, revealing a child she used to babysit had died at 24 due to an opioid overdose.
On Wednesday, current Lieutenant-Governor Mary Taylor, who has been part of Governor John Kasich's office for both of his terms, revealed in an interview that her two sons have been battling opioid addiction since as far back as 2011.
The Taylor family discovered their second son's drug issue when he overdosed and crashed his car in the family driveway. As an ambulance rushed him away, he told his father to tell the medics not to give him any medication - he had already had enough.
Taylor's sons overdosed twice at home, and two other times an ambulance was called to their house. The experience was so traumatic Taylor couldn't isolate one incident from the other.
"I know people who have lost kids, I've been to the funeral of a young person who died of a heroin overdose. Until we found treatment that worked, the voice of worry was very loud and very scary," she said.
As of 2015, just over 60 per cent of opioid deaths were from prescription pills, according to the Centres for Disease Control. Heroin and Fentanyl have cut into that number dramatically since 2011.
But pills continue to be a major factor in the epidemic.
Generally middle-age working class and middle class blue-collar workers are the most likely to get hooked, followed by young athletes in their late teens and early 20s. It starts with an injury in the workplace for the middle-aged and turns into using painkillers to keep going to work.
When the prescription is cut off, the addicted seek other forms of relief, usually heroin. The demand is so high, dealers began cutting heroin with Fentanyl, a more powerful opioid that is cheaper and widely available, and is legal in some cases.
These people aren't seeking the high one would generally get from recreational use but the ability to feel normal, what many doctors say is the worst type of addiction. They seek to go through the day without debilitating pain.
Mixing heroin and Fentanyl together is a fatal practice if it isn't mixed as a liquid. If they are both in solid form, any combination will leave hot spots, parts of the mix that are higher in levels of Fentanyl than others, and usually deadly.
Gubernatorial candidates have discussed charging dealers with manslaughter if they are caught mixing Fentanyl with heroin and selling it.
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