Sarah Donald of Pearl, Missouri, who has been in recovery for nine years, receives naloxone nasal spray from the state’s Save a Life Day event in September. Overdose awareness continues to save lives, but overdoses and deaths have skyrocketed in some areas this year. (Photo: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today)
Illicit drug overdoses and drug-related deaths are trending down this year, despite spikes in several states, according to a Stateline analysis of data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
They say several hotspots are responding to the problem by working together, sharing information about spikes in overdoses and distributing emergency medications.
“The national conversation is all about warships in the Caribbean, drones and borders,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, who studies overdose trends at the University of North Carolina. “This ignores this huge wave of Americans caring for Americans. A huge amount of care and meeting the needs of local communities is done inconspicuously because it is hard and slow work.”
Since 2023, overdose deaths have steadily declined. In April, the most recent available, deaths over the past 12 months were 76,500, the lowest level since March 2020. A surge in overdose deaths during the pandemic pushed the number to nearly 113,000 in the summer of 2023, according to federal statistics.
President Donald Trump does ordered since September 2, it has carried out more than a dozen military attacks on boats in the open waters of the Caribbean and Pacific, claiming, without public evidence, that their passengers were drug smugglers transporting drugs to the United States. Almost 60 people died.
Most of the deadly fentanyl is smuggled across the border with Mexico in passenger cars, according to September report by the Federal Government Accountability Office. The report found that chemicals and equipment, mostly from China, are smuggled in by cargo trucks, merchant ships, planes and mail.
A more recent overdose rate — nonfatal suspected overdose patients in hospital emergency departments — dropped 7% this year through August compared to 2024, according to a CDC analysis by Stateline. statistics.
The number of nonfatal overdoses increased during the year in only a few states and the District of Columbia. The biggest jumps were 17% in the district, 16% in Rhode Island, 15% in Delaware, 11% in Connecticut and 10% in New Mexico, with smaller increases in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, New Jersey and Minnesota.
Other states have seen declines in nonfatal overdoses: Maryland saw the largest decline in August, about 17%.
But Baltimore was attracting attention group with 42 overdoses between July and October, all in the same area. No fatalities were reported. The cluster led the city set aside $2 million in October for more mobile services, harm reduction and community support to fight overdoses.
New Mexico sees more overdoses and more deaths than the previous year in three counties on the Colorado border. In response, New Mexico is distributing both warnings and naloxone, an antidote to opioid overdoses.
Officials are distributing naloxone to store owners near overdose sites and warning those seeking aid about the deadly dangers of local supplies.
“We have started planning for naloxone saturation and different types of outreach to hopefully prevent the situation from getting any worse,” said David Daniels, harm reduction section manager for the New Mexico Health Department.
“There’s tremendous value in messaging directly to customers. It might be, ‘If you decide to use, don’t use the usual amount. Maybe you should use a quarter. Test first,'” Daniels said.
According to Stateline’s calculations, three New Mexico counties – including the capital Santa Fe, the ski resort of Taos and Española, where the murky comedy “The Curse” is set in 2023 – had about 438 more deaths from July to September than in the third quarter of 2024. That’s more than double the 383 overdose deaths in the area during the same period last year.
Roger Montoya, a former Democratic Party official who runs a nonprofit arts organization in Rio Arriba County, said most of the deaths occurred among homeless substance users.
A local hospital has launched programs to provide treatment to more people, and his own group, Moving Arts Española, is focused on helping children and newborn people break the cycle of economic despair that often leads to addiction and homelessness, he said.
“We are trying to redirect and strengthen the resilience of young people who are largely raised by grandparents and relatives because mom and dad are either dead, on the streets or in prison,” Montoya said.
However, most states experiencing an boost in overdoses continue to see fewer deaths, largely because the drug supply in the eastern United States is more restricted with tranquilizers, which do not have the same lethal effect as fentanyl, although they can cause overdoses.
According to him, drugs linked to a mass overdose in Baltimore were cut off using an unusual, powerful sedative federal tests. The sedative can cause unconsciousness, but it cannot be treated with reversal drugs such as naloxone.
In contrast, testing of this year’s cluster in New Mexico generally found more deadly fentanyl than usual in the local supply, said Phillip Fiuty, technical adviser for adulterant testing at the state health department.
“We haven’t seen the type of adulteration that they experience on the East Coast. Once something ends up in New Mexico, there is little or no adulteration,” Fiuty said.
Some East Coast states are reporting more overdoses but fewer deaths. Rhode Island warned of a spike in nonfatal overdoses in August and September, but the data showed that deaths through September were still lower than the same period last year. state figures.
This is not always the case. Connecticut reported a spike in fatal and non-fatal overdoses near interstate highways in May and June.
“One factor is a change in the supply of illegal drugs or bad batches of drugs. I think that’s what it’s all about right now. The drug supply is becoming more and more unpredictable,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
One factor is a change in the supply of illegal drugs or bad batches. …The drug supply is becoming more and more unpredictable.
– Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials
The association has a proposal structure she said cities and counties could be hit strenuous by fresh aggressiveness in law enforcement and greater hostility to local efforts to stop deaths.
The current Trump administration has shown some reluctance to support social harm reduction techniques, she said. That includes a $140 million momentary suspension of funding for a program called Overdose Data to Action, known as OD2A, under which the first Trump administration began sounding the alarm when spikes occurred.
“Given the recent cuts to health care and substance use and overdose prevention services that we are seeing, this is impacting some of the work on the ground,” Freeman said. “This takes people away from the opportunity to make the changes they need to turn their lives around. This could create a bigger overdose problem.”
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at: thenderson@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by state linewhich is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network that includes Pennsylvania Capital-Star, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
