There were nearly 10,000 opioid overdoses in Arizona between the middle of June 2017 and the end of July this year.

Of those, more than 1,500 people died.

Nationally, there were 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses in 2016. But, as bad as those numbers are, David Jernigan points out alcohol is responsible for more than 100,000 deaths every year.

Jernigan is a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and has worked on alcohol issues for about three decades.

Jernigan talked about the changes in how public health officials think about alcohol use and abuse and how the general public thinks about how much alcohol we consume.