Heroin and Fentanyl claiming lives at alarming clip in New Jersey

The ongoing drug epidemic in New Jersey continues to wreak havoc on communities near and far in the Garden State including Ocean County and Monmouth County.

It has become a sad reality, the norm for heroin and fentanyl to circulate in our communities with drug dealers peddling massive amounts of these and other drugs into our communities with no regard for human life.

Law enforcement agencies such as the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office continue to crack down hard on those wheeling and dealing drugs within, into or out of Ocean County and going after drug dealers for all their worth.

Michele Baker of Pleasantville has been charged and will soon head to prison for selling a South Toms River man a lethal concoction of heroin and fentanyl one day and the very next day, he overdosed and died.

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So much more needs to be done in the fight against this raging drug epidemic from taking drugs off the streets, to education, to helping people find recovery, and to prevent drugs from getting into our communities.

There was so much that happened in this first week of July in the news.

Here are some of the top News stories that occurred in Ocean County, Monmouth County, the Jersey Shore, and New Jersey this week.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.