Have overdose deaths in the United States stopped rising? Preliminary government data suggests so, but many experts are urging caution, pointing out that in the past such plateaus have not lasted.
Overdose death rates in the United States began to climb steadily in the 1990s, driven by opioid painkillers, followed by waves of deaths from other opioids like heroin and, more recently, fentanyl .
Last year, more than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses — the highest death toll in US history.
On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released preliminary data on what happened in the first six months of this year. The news seems hopeful.
However, preliminary data indicate that these deaths have fallen three months in a row in the United States. The CDC estimated that there were approximately 107,600 overdose deaths for the 12-month period between July 2021 and June 2022. That’s 40 fewer than for calendar year 2021.
“Today’s data continues to show an encouraging downward trend in overdose deaths,” but more prevention and treatment work is needed, Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of the Office of National Policy, said on Wednesday. White House drug control.
Indeed, this decline is very uneven across the United States. Only eight states reported fewer overdose deaths, while all others saw steady increases. And only four states – Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – reported a significant decrease of 100 or more deaths from the previous July-June period.
The pandemic
Those few states, which had some of the highest overdose death rates in the nation, appear to be behind the improved national toll this year, said Brown University public health researcher Brandon Marshall. , which follows trends.
Officials in the four states said there is no single explanation, but they believe recent moves could bear fruit. They cite social media and education campaigns, the expansion of drug treatment, and the wider distribution of naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of an overdose.
Some researchers doubt that overdoses have peaked in the United States. Rather, they believe a spike occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns and other health restrictions isolated people who use drugs and made treatment harder to get.
“We may just be going back to a pre-COVID level. I think we’ll need at least a year of more data to confirm that,” said Erin Winstanley, a researcher at West Virginia University.
The numbers are not yet close to pre-pandemic levels. Nationally, the estimated number of deaths from July 2021 to June 2022 is still more than 5% higher than the number from July 2020 to June 2021, and 28% higher than from July 2019 to June 2020.
Researchers have already seen these “false plateaus”: overdose deaths seemed to stabilize for a few months in the spring of 2021, before rising.
There may also be lessons to be learned from 2018. That year, there were approximately 67,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States, a 4% drop from 2017. The numbers were celebrated — President Donald Trump proclaimed: “We are curbing the opioid epidemic”.
But some researchers at the University of Pittsburgh later concluded that this improvement was largely due to a 2017 change in Chinese regulations on the potent carfentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times stronger than fentanyl. This change reduced the US drug supply and was followed by a dramatic drop in overdose deaths in a few states.