In 2022, the U.S. reached a grim peak in drug overdose deaths: Nearly 108,000 people died , more than twice the number who died in 2015, and more than four times the number in 2002. Now, in what experts hope is more than a blip, the overdose epidemic that has affected every state might be showing some signs of abating, Vox reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s preliminary data on the 12-month period ending in June showed that overdoses dropped about 15 percentage points from the previous period. There were still roughly 94,000 deaths, signaling that the public health crisis is far from over, though a positive change could be on the horizon. The crisis was exacerbated decades ago by the increasing use of and addiction to synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, that have proliferated through the drug supply. Fentanyl was first produced in the 1960s and prescribed by doctors to people seeking relief from severe pain, such as cancer patients. A cheaper, more potent cousin of heroin, the drug soon became a favored commodity of traffickers, who began cutting other drugs with fentanyl and drawing people addicted to prescription painkillers such as oxycodone that have become increasingly more difficult to access.
“There’s no one event that happened about a year and a half ago that would explain this sudden significant decrease in drug overdose deaths,” says journalist Lev Facher. “While there’s a lot of optimism in the harm reduction and addiction medicine and recovery world, it’s cautious optimism because people don’t really know what’s happening.” The simplest explanation for the drop in overdoses could be the nature of the drugs themselves; they simply may have become less toxic and less potent. Last month, Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram suggested that the agency’s crackdowns were having a direct impact on the drug supply. Another explanation could be that harm-reduction efforts are working. Access to naloxone, the lifesaving, overdose-reversing drug, expanded significantly in the last few years. Local governments such as Los Angeles County made the drug available at schools, churches, libraries, and jails, and everyday Americans are increasingly encouraged to carry naloxone. Ae third explanation, floated by some epidemiologists, is the most bleak, and suggests that after hundreds of thousands of people were killed by drug overdoses in a relatively short time span, the epidemic is essentially burning itself out.
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