Public health officials tell NPR that they’re seeing a drop of at least 10.6 percent in drug overdose deaths – of which fentanyl is by far the largest driver – so far this year and incomplete data suggests an even steeper drop will be apparent once all the records are collected and analyzed.
“This is exciting,” said Dr Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute On Drug Abuse [NIDA], the federal laboratory charged with studying addiction. “This looks real. This looks very, very real.”
“In the states that have the most rapid data collection systems, we’re seeing declines of twenty percent, thirty percent,” said University of North Carolina street drug expert Dr Nabarun Dasgupta, adding that the easier to obtain data on emergency room visits correlates to a steep drop.
Then again maybe the surest sign of improvement is that convicted felon former President Trump and his couch-fucking running mate had to go with migrants eating people’s pets as their shibboleth for “wide open border” instead of something actually real like fentanyl deaths, an epidemic that exploded during the fat bastard’s final two years in office. A chart in the article shows about 68,000 Americans died of overdoses between April 2017 and April 2018, a toll that skyrocketed to 78,000 deaths during the same period in 2018-2019 and then 101,000 between April 2020 and April 2021.