Coast to coast, major U.S. cities are seeing measurable drops in drug overdose deaths. Public health officials welcome the news despite an inability to fully explain the decrease.
After years of rising, the tide may finally be turning on deadly drug overdoses in America.
Drug overdose deaths fell 12.7% in the 12 months ending in May, according to preliminary data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is the largest recorded reduction in overdose deaths,” White House officials said in a statement. “And the sixth consecutive month of reported decreases in predicted 12-month total numbers of drug overdose deaths.”
It’s also the first time since early 2021 that the number of estimated drug overdose deaths for a 12-month period fell below 100,000, to 98,820.
It’s categorically good news. It’s also a bit puzzling to the public health experts who have been working for years to stop the upward trajectory of opioid deaths, driven primarily by fentanyl.
Hypothesis: More people are waiting to see who wins the presidential election before deciding if overdosing is the best escape plan.
I went to pick a prescription at my local Walmart today (texas) and they had a sign saying that they have narcan or noloxone available. My guess is the easy access to narcan and the awareness of it nowadays.
This right here.
The only problem is that it’s not free. Might be great for the occasional opiate user or someone whose worried about their molly being tainted with fent…but addicts gonna addict. Money spent on narcan is money not spent on their next fix.
It’s given out for free at mutual aid events around me.
I think it’s as simple as education at all levels. More people carry narcan. Dealers are selling lower purity stuff. Imitation pills are becoming better measured with less dosage fluctuations. Less people are doing hard drugs in the first place.
Quality/purity of fentanyl in Norcal has gone way down recently apparently. https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/12/fentanyl-soap-purity/ at least here I’m sure that is a major contributing factor
Did deaths per capita drop, or just total deaths?
Because dead people can no longer drive the stats, so it would keep going down unless there was a dramatic increase in overdoses (leading to more deaths).
It still sounds like positive news, but Jesus Christ, 100,000 people a year dying from totally preventable causes? That’s aweful.
The war on drugs working as intended.
OK, let’s keep doing what we’re doing: endless troll posting of attack ad propaganda about candidates in the upcmoming election. Because somehow its saving lives?
Public and first responder access to Narcan. Paramedic and I haven’t had to administer it in months thanks to bystanders, law enforcement and fire rescue getting it on board before I arrive
In my city, there’s a LOT of homeless addicts who abuse drugs. My city invested heavily in providing specialists who walk around with narcan and other supplies.
A few years prior to that, Law enforcement used to arrest these addicts.
So what you’re saying is that they (the city) treated it as a medical problem and not a law enforcement problem. Now you’re seeing fewer deaths and better outcomes for addicts who clearly need help. All they need to do now is work on the mental health issues to treat homelessness and addiction and then gain societal profit. It’s like there is a kinda of logic to treating people with empathy and respect results in better outcomes…
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Drug abuse is in regards to people use drugs in an unhealthy manner, i.e. addiction. You can abuse alcohol as well.
Stop acting like saying ‘abusing drugs is a problem’, is an insult towards people. It’s so performative and useless in helping anybody who has ever had issues with substance abuse.
And “drug abuse” is also language that is used by politicians or police to dehumanize homeless people.
Yes there’s a technical term obviously, but like “retard” or “cripple”, there’s negative connotations that get in the way.
It’s not at all the same, and I’m saying this as someone who has abused them in the past.
You’re trying to make a big deal out of nothing and it’s distracting from the cause.
the drugs did nothing to deserve the abuse, how do we know the homeless were quite so innocent?
It’s easily accessible weed, isn’t it?
No. It’s that most drug users have become aware of narcan, how to use it, and that we started leaving narcan with addicts and their family members after running an overdose call to them, that pretty much all the police, fire, and ems all keep narcan on hand, and that anyone can walk into target and buy the stuff.
Pretty much all the overdoses are from heroin and/or fentanyl. Narcan just gets misted up a nostril and about 2 to 5 minutes later it’s taken over the receptors that heroin/fentanyl bind to.
So the drug problem isn’t lessening. We just started handing out the antidote to an overdose like candy on Halloween
Better than nothing, since dead people can’t seek help. It’s always best to fight the source of the problem, but until that’s achieved you should fight the symptoms. The only 2 downsides ich can think about is that a solution for symptoms can make people more reckless and some people might fear the cost. But neither should be a consideration compared to the life of someone.
Fear the cost? It’s pretty cheap. Problem with fentanyl is that you can’t really stop the supply. You can make it from way too many different things and the dosage is so potent you just need a tiny amount. It’s not like meth where you can control one ingredient and it will cut off a ton of supply.
While I’m sure that does have some effect, the vast majority of people using marijuana aren’t at an outsized risk of overdosing on other drugs. The vast, vast majority of users don’t use anything harder, usually just alcohol.
While that does definitely have an effect, I think the population more affected by that is not the population who are at risk of actually overdosing.
Maybe initially. But long term, if people get into weed through a legal market, they have no reason to engage in the black market, which provides access to lots of other drugs you can OD on.
Sure.
No other reason thatn… well, pretty much the exact same reasons there are now. I mean, yeah, it’s not nothing that people who sell weed sometimes also deal other substances, but the people introduced to a new substance at their dealers is more a D.A.R.E: thing than what tends to happen in real life.
Legalising weed won’t get rid of the use of other substances. We will have to reform the drug laws on all substances.
Judging from the fact that Oregon, Washington and Colorado are not seeing deaths reduced my thought is no.
But it should still happen.
Because druggies are dying and are not being replaced fast enough
Doctor’s are being watched for how many pills the prescribe. Add education to a new generation that watched their parents destroy their lives.
Gotta ask how many of those overdose pills were actually prescribed, rather than illicit from the start.
John Oliver did 4 stories on them. I highly recommend watching them. Youtube has them all for free.
One town in West Virginia was prescribed something crazy like a thousand per person (my number could be way off but it was a massive red flag for the feds).
Edit: The Sackler family is the owners behind it.
A lot of them. So many that there are class action lawsuits because of over-prescription. Make no mistake pharmaceutical companies are AT THE HEART of this epidemic.
Yes I do remember now about the Sacklers going unprosecuted. But I thought a lot was made in Asian labs and simply narco-trafficked. I wonder what the numbers were like.
This guy was one of the trafficking tycoons:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/06/asia/tse-chi-lop-sunblock-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
Edit: fixed some phone keyboard slips.
There were pharmacies refilling prescriptions indefinitely, including expired ones.
Or I knew of at least one pharmacy that was in my area. That helped keep the flow going. The prescription was just the first step.
Also people would hit a range of pharmacies on ome prescription.
Nobody I know will even buy weed off the street anymore because of fentanyl. I’m willing to guess people are hyper aware of it, no matter what their drugs of choice are.
Nobody is putting fentanyl into your weed. It’s financially irresponsible to put a more expensive drug into a less expensive drug and kill your customers with it. And drug dealers care about their money beyond all else, they aren’t going to fuck up their own business. Not only do they want you to come back for more later, they’re definitely not out sourcing fentanyl and then selling it at weed prices, if you want the fenty weed, you damn well better pay up for it.
People getting fentanyl and not knowing it are buying cheap heroin. Because that’s what it is. It’s a heroin analogue that’s way stronger and can be sold cheaper because a nano speck of it is like 4 doses vs an 8-ball of good smack being one or two.
If you buy street weed and it has fentanyl in it and you didn’t ask for it specifically, someone is trying to kill you in particular.
Fentanyl in weed can be a thing though. Scales used by dealers who are weighing different drugs, aren’t necessarily cleaning the scale between use. Cocaine is the bigger offender in that scenario though, and can definitely lead to a way easier overdose than weed would
You know, that’s a good point. I was approaching this from a “nobody would do this on purpose” perspective, and while I do still stand by my point, yours isn’t one I considered.
Where I grew up, every third too-stoned teenager would be like “maaaaan, this weed is laced with acid” and, no, it never was, and there’s like three different really good reasons why it never was. The “street weed can have fentanyl in it!! You could die!!” people have been, in my experience, overwhelmingly that same group.
But that said though you make a very compelling point for simple negligence being the source of those stories.
“maaaaan, this weed is laced with acid” and, no, it never was, and there’s like three different really good reasons why it never was.
Not to mention lacing weed with LSD would do absolutely jack shit unless you ate it raw. (Heat would destroy the LSD before it ever had a chance to reach your neuronal clefts.)
It’s still not likely to be common negligence; weed scales and powder scales are generally different scales (different levels of precision, and different maximum weights), unless you’re dealing with small amounts of weed or large amounts of powder.
I actually know of a young couple in my town who died from fentanyl in their weed. I went and told everyone I knew (and linked them the obits) to warn them to stop buying street weed (it’s illegal here) and make sure they’re getting it safe.
Terrifying stuff.
why would you buy weed off the street instead of from the friendly and incredibly stoned budtender in the basement of a strip mall
We used to be a country
And people are testing their drugs for fentanyl now because of that hyper awareness. Public awareness, easier access to narcan, and fentanyl test strips are probably big contributors to the decrease in OD deaths
I’ve seen that as well, along with various methods of testing/purifying becoming common depending on the compound.
U think any drug addict can afford ozempic even
If you’re not in a shithole Republican state: the ACA allows lots of homeless drug addicts to seek treatment they would otherwise be unable to afford, because they don’t have income or a home, so they qualify for most treatments to be covered. This allows many to fix their lives, although many still do not. Yes, obese meth addicts with heart failure exist.
No we have to throw them in prison and work them for free in a field, that’s the only way…murica.
I hate that this sounds like sarcasm but is in fact, reality.
I know a few physicians who have already been seeing it in their practice.
The drug addicts that risk overdosing and literally die from it are usually not ones that have lots of extra money to pay extra thousands of dollars every month just to “look nice and lose weight”. They care more about getting the high. I think the seriously addicted ones are the ones who have the highest chance of overdosing.
If you tell people that if they do a certain thing that it will most likely kill them or have a high likelihood of killing them … eventually enough people begin to understand that.
Children and young people are also very intelligent people with no preconceived or prejudiced ideas of their own (unless taught by someone else) … so they are quick to learn from the mistakes of others around them if given the chance.
If you tell people that if they do a certain thing that it will most likely kill them or have a high likelihood of killing them … eventually enough people begin to understand that.
And the important part is that it’s the truth this time.
Before, they were saying weed would kill people. That got a segment of a generation who would grow up wondering “What else were they lying about?”
The difference this time is that just about everyone now knows someone who either died or was severely affected by opioids. No better way to drive home the truth than by direct examples and demonstrations.
Personally, I know four people who died of drug overdoses, a dozen more in my extended circle of family and friends and two who are living vegetables from overdoses.
I’m willing to bet that you probably know someone yourself.
Yeah, it went from “Any illegal drug will kill you or drive you insane”, to “All that anti-drug stuff is nonsense, they aren’t THAT bad” to finally, a much more nuanced “Some drugs should definitely not be fucked with”.
I know zero people that belong in either of those groups. I’m pretty sure one degree of separation from me also have zero of those people in their friend groups. Anecdotes aren’t evidence.
Agreed. I’ve never known anyone hooked on opioids despite the fact that I know 3 people with astonishing levels of chronic pain. 2 of them have POTS. I was on tons of Vicodin for nearly 3 years though the VA, and then one day they decided to throw a single bottle of muscle relaxers at me and that did the trick. The pain was gone. When I told them I was good and didn’t need the Vicodin anymore, it stopped and I still had like 240 7.5 mg of it left. Which I used for stuff like headaches lol. I was very lucky I never got addicted.
The article isn’t loading for me, but only looking at the past few months or years isn’t indicative of a larger trend, because COVID caused outliers in just about every data set. I’ll believe it if it’s down compared to 2010 and earlier.
Edit: it loaded, and yeah when they compare to 2018 it’s similar or slightly down. So it’s just returning to pre-covid levels.
