In 2024, 30,000 deaths were recorded in the United States for drug overdose than in the previous year, the greatest decrease in a year ever registered.
It is estimated that 80,000 people died from overdose In 2024, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, in English) published on Wednesday. This represents a 27% decrease compared to 110,000 deaths registered in 2023.
CDC have been collecting comparable data for 45 years. The other largest fall from one year to another was 4% from 2017 to 2018, according to the Agency’s National Health Statistics Center.
All states experienced descents last year, with the exception of South Nevada and Dakota, who saw slight increases some of the greatest falls occurred in Ohio, West Virginia and other states that have been hard beaten by the drug overdose epidemic for decades.
Several experts said that it is necessary to continue investigating to understand what this reduction is due, but mention several possible factors. Among the most cited with:
- Increased Naloxone availability, an anticoagulant drug.
- The expansion of addiction treatments.
- Changes in the way of consuming drugs.
- The growing impact of the billions of dollars in compensation for judicial demands against the pharmacists produced by opiates.
- The number of Americans at risk is decreasing, after the waves of deaths from older adults and the distance from adolescents and young adults from drugs that cause most deaths.
Even so, annual overdose deaths are greater than before the Covid-19 pandemic. In a statement, the CDC said that overdose is still the main cause of death among people aged 18 to 44, “which underlines the need to continue working to maintain this progress.”
Some experts are concerned that the recent decrease can slow down or stop if federal funds and public health personnel are reduced, or if the strategies that seem to be working are abandoned.
“Now it’s not the time to raise the foot of the accelerator”said Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, an expert in drug policy at the University of California in San Francisco.
Provisional figures are estimates of all people who died from overdose in the United States, including undocumented migrants. These data are still being processed, and the definitive figures may differ a bit. But it is clear that last year there was a huge descent.
These experts added that there have been past moments in which overdose deaths in the United States seemed to have stagnated or had even begun to go down, just to rise again. That happened in 2018.
There are reasons to be optimistic
Naloxone has become more widely available, partly due to the introduction of free sales versions that do not require recipes.
Meanwhile, drug manufacturers, distributors, pharmacy chains and other companies have reached agreements with state and local governments about analgesics who in the past were one of the main causes of overdose deaths. The agreements of the last decade have promised about 50,000 million dollars, most of which will be allocated to the fight against addiction.
This year another agreement could be approved, one of the largest, in which the members of the Sackler family, owner of Purdue Pharma, an Oxycontin manufacturer, would commit to pay up to 7,000 million dollars.
Money, together with the financing of federal taxpayers, will be used for various programs, such as support housing and damage reduction measures, such as the supply of materials to analyze medications in search of fentanyl, the main cause of overdose today.
But what each state will do with that money is currently in question. “The states can say: ‘We have won, we can relax’ after the descents or they can use the demand money and other efforts,” said Regina Labelle, a former director of the Office of the National Drug Control Policy Office. He now directs an addiction and public policies at the University of Georgetown.
The Trump administration considers that opioids are largely a problem of application of the law And a reason to increase border security. That worries many leaders and defenders of public health.
“We believe that adopting a public health approach that seeks to support – not punish – to people who consume drugs is crucial to end the overdose crisis,” said Dr. Tamara Olt, a woman from Illinois whose 16 -year -old son died of a heroin overdose in 2012. He is now executive director of Broken No Moorea defense organization focused on substance consumption disorders.
OLT attributed the recent declines to the growing availability of naloxone, to work to facilitate the treatment and greater awareness of the problem.
Kimberly Douglas, another woman from Illinois whose 17 -year -old son died of overdose in 2023, attributed merit to the voices of afflicted mothers. “Over time, people were going to start listening. Unfortunately, they have taken more than 10 years.”
