In October, provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found overdose deaths decreased by 10% between April 2023 and April 2024, the first time since the 1990s that overdose deaths had declined at all.
That trend seems to be continuing downward, with drug deaths declining for a consecutive 12 month period ending in June 2024 by an even greater 17%, according to new CDC data released this week. Overdose deaths take a while to be measured, but the agency’s predictive model suggests that once these numbers are finalized across states, the number of people to die from an overdose across this 12-month period will be approximately 96,000.
Although still an extremely high number, roughly killing as many Americans per year as diabetes, the overdose crisis is set to kill fewer than 100,000 Americans this year for the first time since 2020.
Around 2014, the ultra-potent synthetic opioid fentanyl began rapidly spreading across the drug supply and made an already deadly crisis far more deadly. It’s unclear what is causing the current decline, yet some have speculated that it could be due to ramped up harm reduction programs, increased access to substance use medications like buprenorphine, changes in the drug supply, or, likely, some combination of these factors.
“We are throwing a lot at this,” CDC Director Mandy Cohen said at a panel in Washington Wednesday, per STAT News. “And we’re starting to really break through, I think, with some important things.”
Still, many are cautiously warning not to overly interpret the data to suggest that the country is in any way out of the woods with the overdose crisis.
“You take your eye off this ball, you take your resources away from it, and this can get away from us,” Cohen said.
