The ‘horrific’ reason fentanyl deaths are going down

Deaths from fentanyl appear to be falling for the first time in a decade after reaching astronomical levels, but experts warn there is a ‘horrific’ reason behind it.

They say the drug has simply run out of people to kill after claiming the lives of about 320,000 Americans over the past decade.

About 75,000 people were killed in the US last year by the deadly powerful drug, which was slightly less than the year before and the first time since 2011 that deaths fell year-on-year.

Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle, is like a microcosm for the rest of the country. Fentanyl-related deaths fell by nearly 10 percent at the end of 2023 compared to the previous quarter.

But Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, an addiction expert at the University of Washington, said this could be because so many users are already dead.

The graph above shows the number of Americans who die from synthetic drug overdoses each week. These are deaths due to fentanyl. After years of rising, deaths across the country have finally reached a plateau

He told the local news channel KUOW: ‘There are only so many people who take a drug, and if it is that deadly, it will eventually – in a truly gruesome way – extinguish itself, just like a forest fire.

“So the fuel has literally burned out. The terrible thing in this case is that the fuel is people.’

Earlier this year, the CDC reported that drug overdose deaths fell by three percent between 2023 and 2022. This was the first annual decline since 2018.

The latest data shows that the US recorded 65,787 deaths from overdoses of synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl, in the 12 months to April 2024 – down from a peak of 77,693 in June 2023.

Washington state was previously considered a hotspot for fentanyl overdoses.

In 2022, nearly 56 children in Washington state’s foster care and child welfare system died or died after taking illegal drugs, including fentanyl. This was as much as the total for 2019 to 2021 combined.

Of the 56 cases, fentanyl was involved in 38 cases.

Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, an addiction expert at the University of Washington, said the decline in synthetic opioid deaths in Seattle could be due to the drug running out of people to kill.

The above graph shows how synthetic opioid deaths in fentanyl hotspot Washington have slowly declined since January, the most recent data available.

However, rates have slowly fallen since the end of last year. According to the most recent CDC data, there were 2,632 deaths from synthetic opioids in April 2024, down slightly from a peak of 2,727 in February 2024.

Dr. Banta-Green also pointed to a decline in the number of hubs along the East Coast, such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

West Virginia, which has been plagued by the opioid crisis for more than three decades, reported 1,002 deaths from synthetic opioids in April 2024, down from 1,169 in September 2023. The Mountain State saw a peak of 1,263 in April 2021.

Pennsylvania is also in the spotlight for increasing fentanyl use and deaths, especially in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood.

In 2022, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health recorded 1,413 unintentional overdose deaths, an 11 percent increase from 2021.

In West Virginia, which has been plagued by the opioid epidemic for 30 years, death rates from synthetic opioids have also fallen, according to the chart above.

And the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimates that eight in 10 of these overdoses were due to fentanyl.

The CDC has no data on synthetic opioid overdoses in Pennsylvania; the state reported a total of 4,721 drug overdose deaths in 2023, a nine percent decrease from 2022.

Dr. Banta-Green said: “I hope we continue to see a decline, but I hope that the future decline is not because people are dying, but because they are getting access to the really wonderful life-saving interventions that we make really great. steps have been taken to make it more widely available.’