Pennsylvania is already dealing with one public health crisis — the opioid epidemic — that kills thousands of people each year.

According to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, we might well be suffering from another, quieter crisis: distracted drivers.

According to the office — which this week released data on citations issued for the violations of the state’s statutes on texting while driving, driving while using a hand-held cell phone, and driving while wearing earphones or headphones — citations for distracted driving increased by 52 percent last year, to 5,054.

That’s bad enough, but the incidents — or at least the number of drivers caught by law enforcement — have increased 172 percent since 2013.

In Pennsylvania it is illegal to text while driving, or wear or use headphones or earphones while driving.

Those prohibitions seem quite reasonable, which begs the question: Why don’t drivers here seem to care about safety — theirs and others — while on the road?

We’re looking at you, Butler County drivers.

In 2016 law enforcement issued 45 citations in Butler County for Title 75 violations. Last year that number ticked up slightly to 51 citations. The vast majority (30) were for texting while driving.

That might not seem like a big deal, but the problem becomes more clear the further back in time one goes. In 2013 there were just 20 citations issued in Butler County for Title 75 violations.

Two things need to be said regarding this problem.

First, we need to recognize the efforts of the police officers who are detecting and citing these motorists.

According to the office’s report, state police were responsible for about 45 percent of the violations issued last year. That means most citations are written by officers in our municipal departments.

That work is imperative, given how pervasive distracted driving appears to be in Pennsylvania. According to records kept by PennDOT, distracted driving was a factor in 16,036 crashes, including 61 fatalities, in 2016.

Which brings us to our second point: there’s no excuse for the drivers who engage in this reckless conduct — and there are apparently a lot of them.

A 2016 study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institution found that drivers engage in some form of distracting activity 50 percent of the time, and are twice as likely to be involved in a crash when their full attention is not on the road,

A recent AAA study found most motorists already realize that this is dangerous — they just don’t care. The AAA survey found that 58 percent of motorists believe using a cell phone while driving is dangerous; 49 percent said they used one anyway.

Based on data in the court office’s report, we know that most of these distracted drivers are men (69 percent); and many (37 percent) are people in their 20s. Senior citizens (0.04 percent) and teenagers (6 percent) aren’t the major culprits.

What is it going to take to get people who should already know better to put their phones down and concentrate on the road?