“Medical examiners around the country are being overrun with bodies that no one comes to pick up, a trend that many coroners attribute to the nation’s opioid epidemic. Drug-overdose deaths increased by 10 percent from 2016 to 2017, largely driven by fentanyls and similar drugs, according to the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention. The bodies that remain accounted for, meanwhile, float in and out of state custody. No one is quite sure what to do with them. The United States has no uniform system for managing the unclaimed. There is no federal law outlining what steps to take, and many states do not have clear procedures, leaving individual medical examiners to make decisions about how to best deal with the bodies. As a result, examiners without money to simply bury or cremate the remains are resorting to inventive—and strange—solutions.”

- Michael Waters, The Atlantic