After reaching historic levels, fatal overdoses from opioids are dropping rapidly. Today we bring you a reporter's notebook from NPR's national addiction correspondent Brian Mann. He tells host Scott Detrow what it's been like to cover America's addiction crisis and explains the significance of the recent decline in opioid deaths. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [email protected] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Every month, NPR reporter Brian Mann checks a grim statistic, the federal tally of overdose deaths across the country. For years, that number only went up.
But then, toward the end of 2023... Suddenly, the data coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed this drop.
Maybe it was a fluke. But the next month, same thing.
One month, two months in a row it dropped. Three months.
Brian also started hearing the same thing from sources on the street. Like this man, Kevin Donaldson, who was using fentanyl and xylosine in Burlington, Vermont.
For a while there, we were hearing about it every other day. But when it was the last overdose, we heard about a couple weeks still maybe. That's pretty far and few between.
What I was hearing from people using drugs on the street, talking to frontline harm reduction people, listening to people in Washington looking at this, they were saying this feels different. The carnage feels like it's easing. Suddenly, there was a shift.
Across the country, the number of overdose deaths has continued to drop to this day.
This is a science fiction level event, like never before. in the history of America's drug crisis, and this goes even back before the pain pill crisis of the 90s, go back to heroin, go back to crack cocaine, we've never solved a drug epidemic in the way that these numbers suggest.
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