It looks like a scene from the Walking Dead.

Two crazed zombies slumped across a car in Ohio, mouths open and eyes sunken.

Behind them is a young four-year-old boy, sitting patiently in his seat, wondering what the hell is going on.

But this is not a movie set.

This is the full, horrifying reality of heroin-ravaged America.

This is the full, horrifying reality of heroin-ravaged America - like a scene from the Walking Dead, with a child sitting in the back seat

It would be shocking enough if this were a one-off incident. But it’s not. It happens every single day all over America in myriad manifestations. The majority of users get their start with prescription drugs as the gateway

The ‘zombies’ are Rhonda Pasek – the boy’s mother - and her boyfriend James Acord, both so out of their heads on smack they can’t even stay conscious let alone operate a car.

It was 3.11pm when their Ford Explorer was stopped for driving erratically before screeching to a halt near a school bus that was dropping off children.

When the officer approached the vehicle, he noticed Pasek was unconscious and the driver, Acord, appeared intoxicated with his head bobbing back and forth and his speech almost unintelligible.

He then passed out like Pasek.

They’ve both now been charged with various offences and the boy placed in the custody of children’s services.

We’d have known nothing about this if the local police department hadn’t decided enough was enough and made public the photos they took at the scene.

I’m glad they did, for it may jolt us out of our collective blinkered apathy and ignorance.

It’s hard to imagine a more unsettling, disturbing and frankly despicable set of images.

One which will cause every parent who sees it to scream ‘DISGRACE!’

And one which will cause every U.S. police officer to slowly shake their head and mutter: ‘No surprise.’

It would be shocking enough if this were a one-off incident.

But it’s not. It happens every single day all over America in myriad manifestations.

The ‘zombies’ are Rhonda Pasek – the boy’s mother - and her boyfriend James Acord, but they are hardly unique. Heroin addiction is rampant in the United States

‘We are well aware that some may be offended by these images and for that we are truly sorry,’ said the City of East Liverpool’s police department, ‘but it is time the non drug using public sees what we are now dealing with on a daily basis. The poison known as heroin has taken a strong grip on many communities not just ours, the difference is we are willing to fight this problem until it’s gone and if that means we offend a few people along the way we are prepared to deal with that.’

How big is this problem?

Well, two days ago, just 260 miles down the road in Hamilton County, Ohio, an unprecedented immunity deal was launched permitting anyone to turn in a stash of drugs without facing criminal charges.

‘There is an emergency in this community and we’ve got to do something to get it off the streets,’ explained Hamilton County District Attorney Joe Deters.

Anyone can now drop off narcotics, no questions asked.

‘We realize we’re not going to be able to arrest ourselves out of this,’ said Sheriff Jim Neil.

Think about those words for a moment.

A police force admitting that heroin addiction is now so prevalent they cannot stem it through the normal process of law.

The statistics are mind-boggling: authorities said that nearly 300 heroin overdoses were reported in the Cincinnati area since August 19 alone, 174 of them in a six-day period.

That’s more than one an hour.

In Hamilton County, the number of accidental drug overdose deaths doubled to 414 last year from 204 in 2012.

This year so far there have been 92 overdoses reported a month, more than double the monthly average for the first six months of 2015.

These horrifying numbers are being replicated right across America, a country where 435,000 people now admit taking heroin every month and where heroin-related deaths have quadrupled this century.

Even more worryingly, the strength of the heroin is accelerating at an even deadlier rate.

The New York Times recently reported that many of those deaths are being caused by the growing use of super-powerful synthetic opiates like fentanyl and carfentanil.

Fentanyl can be 50 times stronger than heroin, and carfentanil – an animal tranquilizer used on elephants - can be 100 times stronger than fentanyl.

This hideous hybrid heroin is now so potent that authorities won’t even field test it: one sniff could KILL a drug dog, an amount smaller than a snowflake could kill a human being.

The people taking it are from every walk of life; all ages, all colours, all creeds, all sections of the wealth and work status divide.

In fact, many of the new breed of heroin addicts are prosperous white women with families and good jobs.

The only common denominator is that once you’re hooked, you’re on a fast track to hell that often results in death.

So who is to blame for this devastating epidemic?

The U.S. Government and U.S. medics, that’s who.

Three out of four heroin addicts in America start out using, and becoming addicted to, prescription drugs. Fentanyl, seen here, can be 50 times stronger than heroin

They have conspired to make America the most pill-popping nation on earth – marketing, promoting and selling a mountainous array of prescription drugs to anyone they can cynically snare into the multi-billion-dollar business.

There’s now a clear gateway emerging from this unedifying alliance: three out of four heroin addicts in America start out using, and becoming addicted to, prescription drugs.

How did this happen?

Take just one example: in 1995, the Food and Drug Administration approved the opioid analgesic OxyContin, made predominantly from the opium-derivative oxycodone.

It grew rapidly to represent a third of America’s entire painkiller market, actively prescribed by doctors being paid large sums of cash by drugs companies to promote it.

By 2010, America, with 5% of the world’s population, was consuming 80% of the oxycodone market.

The volume of opioid-analgesic overdoses and deaths increased almost as fast as the sales of the drug.

Understandably, given this surge in demand, the world’s opium producers are clapping their filthy hands in glee.

Mexico’s opium output rose 50% in 2014 thanks, it was reported, to a ‘voracious American appetite” for heroin.

Afghanistan’s poppy fields expanded by 36% from 2012 to 2013 alone, and are now at their all-time record levels of cultivation – the majority of its end product heroin ending up in America.

So today’s appalling photographs of Rhonda Pasek and James Acord are not some weird anomaly.

They are the norm for many parts of America and the situation is worsening dramatically.

So by all means recoil in horror when you look at these pictures because they are indeed truly horrifying.

But to sit back and glibly mock and scorn these two feckless addicts for their appalling negligence is to miss the point about what caused it.

America has a terrible problem with illegal drugs, and heroin especially.

It has a far worse problem, however, with legal drugs.

The lawful pharmaceutical industry in the United States is the most insidious, vile and addiction-provoking monster of its type on the planet.

Until it is properly confronted and curtailed, the migration of addicts from legal highs to heroin hell will continue at its fast and furious rate.

So my real wrath isn’t reserved for this wretched couple collapsed at the wheel of their car.

It’s aimed squarely at every politician and doctor who has enabled this horrendous scourge on society by encouraging Americans to medicate themselves in such a disastrously excessive and unnecessary manner.