Drug overdose deaths are decreasing sharply, a dramatic improvement in efforts to reverse the results of fentanyl’s spread in the illicit drug supply. Between April 2023 and April 2024, overdose deaths declined by about 10 percent nationally to 101,000, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That was the largest decrease on record, according to the Biden administration. Nonfatal overdoses are down more than 10 percent. The data suggest that some tools used to combat opioid overdoses, such as naloxone, the overdose-reversing medication, were having a significant impact. Still, researchers and federal and state health officials have puzzled over why overdoses have fallen so much in recent months, reports the New York Times. The pace of the decline “is such an anomaly in the last 20 years,” said Nabarun Dasgupta of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who published an analysis of the state and federal data. Some states have reported even greater decreases than the national rate. In Kentucky, overdose deaths dropped by more than a third between April 2023 and March 2024. Arizona, Maine and Vermont all recorded recent decreases of around 15 percent. North Carolina’s fentanyl overdose rate fell by more than 30 percent from May 2023 to May 2024.
Drug overdoses have amounted to one of the most intractable public health crises, increasing almost every year since the 1970s and peaking at 111,000 in 2022. They declined slightly last year to around 108,000. Experts noted that the number of overdose deaths remained extraordinarily high, raising the question of whether the recent good news was a blip or the beginning of a sustained downward trend. Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, said regulations for addiction treatments had been loosened, while newly over-the-counter naloxone had become cheaper. He acknowledged that attributing the decrease to specific strategies was difficult. Drug policy experts and health officials have pointed to a number of theories that could help explain the trend. Naloxone, which can be injected or sprayed in the nose, has become widely available in recent years, in part because of large federal grants to state health departments that helped saturate communities with the medication. Lawmakers and federal officials have moved to loosen restrictions on buprenorphine and methadone, two common, effective and underprescribed opioid addiction treatments. Health providers no longer need a special license known as an “X waiver” to prescribe buprenorphine, while clinics can offer more take-home doses of methadone.
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