Opioid overdose deaths have now slowed to the lowest levels nationwide since 2020, according to new estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the twelfth month in a row reject since a peak last year.
About 70,655 deaths from opioids such as heroin and… fentanyl reported for the year ending June 2024, the CDC now estimates, and fell 18% from the same period in 2023.
Nearly all states, with the exception of a handful in the West, from Alaska to Nevada, are now seeing significant declines in overdose death rates. Early data from Canada also suggests that overdose deaths there could now peak in 2023.
“While these data are cause for optimism, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is still estimated that nearly 100,000 people die each year from drug overdoses in the US,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. in a statement.
Forms of drug overdose other than opioids are also declining. Although they make up a smaller share of overall deaths, overdoses linked to drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine are also showing signs of decline across the country after peaking last year.
“We’re encouraged by this data, but boy, it’s time to double down on the things we know work. Now is not the time to retreat, and I strongly believe, and our data shows, that the threat continues. to evolve,” said Dr. Allison Arwady, head of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, told CBS News.
Arwady pointed to a long list of factors that officials hope are contributing to the decline, ranging from wider availability of the reversible overdose spray naloxone, also known as Narcanto efforts to close gaps in access medications that can treat opioid use disorder.
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Trends in what health officials call “primary prevention” have also improved in recent years — meaning fewer people are using the drugs to begin with. As an example, Arwady cited CDC surveys that showed a marked decline in the number of high school students reporting they had tried illegal drugs.
The CDC and health departments have also become faster at collecting and analyzing data to respond to spikes in overdoses, Arwady said, often caused by new so-called “adulterants” mixed in. Health authorities are studying this by testing blood and drug samples. in the wake of spikes, looking for potential emerging drug threats.
Agency investigators are now taking a closer look at what might be behind the gaps in communities that are still not seeing delays, Arwady said.
“Unfortunately, mortality rates for the most affected groups, namely Native Americans and Black American men, are not declining and are at the highest recorded levels,” Volkow said.
Why are drug overdose deaths declining?
In the months since CDC data first showed real signs of a nationwide change in the deadly record wave of opioid overdose deaths, experts have put forward a number of theories to explain what caused the change.
“We saw the numbers going down nationally since April last year, and we were skeptical and kept our mouths shut. That’s when we started listening to a lot of people on the ground, frontline providers,” he said. Nabarun Dasgupta, a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who studies opioid overdose deaths.
Dasgupta led an analysis in September by the university’s Opioid Data Lab that illustrated the nationwide scope of the recession and explored some of the theories that could explain it.
They have dismissed some explanations as unlikely, such as intensified law enforcement operations. Other ideas they considered plausible but complicated to prove, such as a so-called “susceptible depletion” – essentially the epidemic burning itself out as users found ways to survive the crisis. influx of fentanyl or died – or the wider availability of naloxone.
Dasgupta said that since their first post, they have received an outpouring of interest proposing more theories, such as new scanners being deployed at the US-Mexico border.
There are likely a number of factors that all play a role in the shift, Dasgupta says. But he said early data from research they are completing now supports one key explanation: a shift in the illegal drug supply.
“Our hypothesis is that something has changed in the supply of medicines. These kinds of pronounced shifts, something that happens suddenly, if the numbers had suddenly increased, we would certainly point to a change in the supply of medicines to explain this,” Dasgupta said. .
Amidst its disadvantages, xylazine‘The rise could have led to less injection drug use, they speculate. The longer high could also reduce the number of times people use fentanyl per day.
“We’re not celebrating in our offices. We’re still losing too many people we love. So I want to make it very clear that with a hundred thousand people still dying, that’s obscenely high,” he said.
