NEW YORK — The number of fatal overdoses in the U.S. fell last year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Wednesday.
Agency officials noted that the data is provisional and could change after further analysis, but that they still expect a drop when final counts are made. It would be only the second annual decline since the current national epidemic of drug deaths began more than three decades ago.
Experts reacted cautiously. One described the decline as relatively small and said it should be thought of more as part of a leveling off than a decrease. Another noted that the last time a decline occurred — in 2018 — drug deaths spiked in the following years.
“Any decline is encouraging,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. “But I think it’s certainly premature to celebrate or draw any large-scale conclusions about where we might go in the long term with this crisis.”
It’s also too early to know what spurred the decline, Marshall and other experts said. Explanations could include changes in the drug supply, the expansion of overdose prevention and addiction treatment, and the grim possibility that the epidemic has killed so many people that there are now essentially fewer people to kill.
CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deb Houry called the drop “encouraging news” and praised efforts to reduce the toll, but she noted that “families and friends are still losing loved ones to drug overdoses in staggering numbers.” ”.
About 107,500 people died from overdoses in the U.S. last year, including U.S. citizens and noncitizens who were in the country at the time they died, the CDC estimated. That represents a 3% drop from 2022, when there were about 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.
The drug overdose epidemic, which has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, has had many ripple effects. For example, a study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry estimated that more than 321,000 children in the U.S. lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose between 2011 and 2021.
“These children need support” and are at higher risk for mental health and substance abuse problems, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who helped lead the study. “It’s not just about the loss of one person. It’s also the implications that the loss has for the family left behind.”
Prescription painkillers once drove the country’s overdose epidemic, but were supplanted years ago by heroin and, more recently, illegal fentanyl. The dangerously powerful opioid was developed to treat severe pain caused by diseases such as cancer, but has increasingly been mixed with other drugs in the illicit drug supply.
For years, fentanyl was frequently injected, but increasingly it is smoked or mixed into counterfeit pills.
A study published last week found that seizures of pills containing fentanyl by authorities are increasing dramatically, jumping from 44 million in 2022 to more than 115 million last year.
It’s possible that the seizures indicate that the global supply of pills containing fentanyl is growing rapidly, and not necessarily that law enforcement is reducing the supply of illicit drugs, said one of the paper’s authors, Dr. Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, California. San Francisco. .
He noted that the decline in overdoses has not been uniform. All but two states in the eastern half of the US saw declines, but most western states saw increases. Alaska, Washington and Oregon each saw increases of 27%.
The reason? Many eastern states have been dealing with fentanyl for about a decade, while it has hit western states more recently, Ciccarone said.
However, some researchers say there are reasons to be optimistic. It’s possible that smoking fentanyl isn’t as lethal as injecting it, but scientists are still exploring that question.
Meanwhile, more money is becoming available to treat addiction and prevent overdoses, through government funding and also through legal agreements with drug manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies, Ciccarone noted.
“My hope is that 2023 is the beginning of a turning point,” he said.
___
AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson contributed to this report.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. AP is solely responsible for all content.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
