The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 101,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the year ending this past April. That’s a lot of people. And the regional disparities are stark. In Baltimore alone, 1,000 die every year—twice the rate of any other major American city.
The situation is grim. But it might be improving—a little. The CDC’s preliminary data shows that between April 2023 and April 2024, overdose deaths in America declined by 10 percent. It’s the largest drop on record—and in some states, truly remarkable: In Ohio, deaths fell by 31 percent.
But this follows record-setting years when fatalities rose sharply: Between April 2018 and April 2019, nearly 69,000 people died. Between April 2022 and April 2023, that number rose to 112,000. And that, in turn, followed several decades of spreading opioid abuse across America.
Now, though, that trend is possibly turning. The drop in overdose deaths recorded this April will continue if the preliminary, tentative CDC numbers turn out to be correct. What’s behind this drop?
Magdalena Cerdá is a professor of population health at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, where she leads the Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy. Cerdá says that in recent years, American officials have implemented a whole suite of new strategies to prevent and reduce overdose deaths—and there are signs that those strategies are now working. But the U.S. is in the third decade of its opioid epidemic—and this wouldn’t be the first time public health officials thought things might be improving …
Gustav Jönsson: What do we know about the recent decline in drug-overdose deaths?
Casey Keyler
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