US overdose deaths continue downward trend, giving experts hope

Experts aren’t sure what is causing fewer overdose deaths, but they are hopeful the decline is sustainable.

Drug overdose deaths in the United States appear to continue to decline, giving experts hope that the nation is seeing sustained improvement in what remains an epidemic.

Some 97,000 people died of a drug overdose in the 12-month period that ended June 30, according to provisional data released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday. That’s down 14 percent from the estimated 113,000 for the previous 12 months.

“This is a pretty stunning and rapid reversal of drug overdose mortality numbers,” Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends, told The Associated Press.

Overdose death rates began steadily climbing in the 1990s because of opioid painkillers, followed by waves of deaths led by other opioids like heroin and — more recently — fentanyl. Provisional data had indicated a slight decline for 2023, and the new data suggests that the downward trend is continuing.

“This seems to be substantial and sustained,” Marshall said. “I think there’s real reason for hope here.”

It’s not clear what led to the decline, but experts proposed a combination of possible factors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, some said, addiction treatment was hard to get and people were socially isolated, leading to a meteoric rise in drug overdose deaths — and explaining in part the decline we are seeing now.

Still, overdose deaths remain well above where they were before the pandemic.

Experts also said the recent numbers could represent the result of years of efforts to increase the availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, and other addiction treatments. Such efforts are likely being aided by resources made available from settlements of opioid-related lawsuits against drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies. Settlement funds have been rolling out to small towns and big cities across the US, and some have started spending the money on naloxone along with other measures.

In the latest CDC data, overdose death reports were down in 45 states, but there were increases in Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington.

The most dramatic decreases were seen in North Carolina and Ohio, but CDC officials warn that some jurisdictions have had lags in getting death records to federal statisticians. The CDC tried to account for incomplete death records, but the decline in some places may ultimately turn out not to be as dramatic as initial numbers suggest.

Another limitation of the provisional data is that it does not detail what is happening in different groups of people. Recent research noted that the overdose deaths in Black and Native Americans have been growing disproportionately larger.