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Category: National News
New Report: U.S. drug overdose deaths rise again after hopeful decline
Read the original article on the NPR website.
For the first time in more than a year, street drug deaths appear to be rising across the U.S. according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The latest available data, compiled in January of this year, shows fatal overdoses over the previous 12-month period increased by roughly 1,400 deaths.
“This slight increase reflects historic data and suggests that the U.S. saw more overdose deaths in January 2025 than it did in January 2024,” the CDC said in a statement sent to NPR. “We are working on analyses to better understand geographic trends.”
The CDC data suggests roughly 82,138 deaths during the 12-month period ending in January 2025. That would be a significant increase from the December 2024 report, but it’s still far below the overdose crisis peak of 114,664 recorded in August 2023.
Still, after seventeen months of declines in fatal overdoses that stunned drug policy experts and an unprecedented 27 percent drop in drug deaths in 2024, some addiction researchers described this report as troubling.
Keith Humphreys, a researcher at Stanford University, said the new CDC data could be an early warning that drug death declines brought on by a number of factors, including the end of COVID pandemic disruptions and weaker fentanyl being sold on U.S. streets, could be fading.
“If we assume it’s not a blip, this makes it more likely that the sudden drop [in fatal overdoses] was a one-off event rather than a fundamental change in epidemic dynamics,” Humphreys said in an email.
Most overdose deaths in the U.S. are caused by fentanyl, but researchers who sample the street drug supply have warned of an increasingly dangerous mix of chemicals being sold by dealers, including cocaine and methamphetamines, as well veterinary tranquilizers such as medetomidine and xylazine.
“Overdose trends are not a one-way street, and there will be periodic local increases,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, who studies overdose trends at the University of North Carolina.
His analysis of the latest CDC data suggested “most of the country is still trending down in the right direction.”
According to Dasgupta, the “increase in predicted national numbers are driven primarily by upticks in Texas, Arizona, California and Washington.”
Continue reading “New Report: U.S. drug overdose deaths rise again after hopeful decline”Alleged attempted fentanyl drugging shuts down Southern Colorado music festival
Read the original article on the KRDO website.
LAS ANIMAS COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) – The Apogaea festival was set to be held June 4-8, but it was cut short due to alleged non-consensual drugging involving fentanyl. On Sunday, the Apogaea Board of Directors released a statement to clarify the weekend’s events.
The festival is known as a Colorado Burning Man regional event held near Trinidad, just north of New Mexico. What was expected to be a weekend full of art and music was quickly shut down.
On Thursday afternoon, event organizers say two festival goers came to a department tent, saying they had been gifted a substance that they tested positive for fentanyl. They say a volunteer notified the Apogaea Incident Command System (ICS), which in turn alerted the County emergency coordinator. Apogaea says they never had custody of the substance and did not test it.
The next morning, on Friday, organizers say a participant noticed an undissolved gelcap in their clear water bottle. This tested positive for fentanyl via two strip tests. Organizers say that since the bottle had been on volunteer premises, there was immediate concern that somebody might be targeting the volunteers. Apogaea says they tested the gelcap again with multiple reagent tests, which resulted in confirming the presence of multiple substances.
Field test methodologies are not 100% accurate, and they can result in false positives, shared the Apogaea board. With the presence of the gelcap reagent tests and the multiple positive fentanyl results, Apogaea says their teams had a high confidence that this was a situation of non-consensual drugging.
Organizers say that as a precaution, community water in the nearby Center Camp Café and Ranger Station was dumped. The board says they updated the County and worked with the Las Animas County Sheriff’s Office (LACSO) to come to the decision to close the event.
The Sheriff’s Office tells KRDO13 it was aware of the incident, however, it was not contacted by anyone to initiate a formal investigation of the alleged incident, nor have any suspects been identified.
KRDO13 spoke with Joe Richards, the Las Animas County Emergency Manager, who was in contact with the event organizers. Richards says the incident commander contacted him initially on Thursday to make him aware that two people at the festival had tested for and found fentanyl in a substance someone had given to them.
He says that after they had another instance with someone finding a capsule in their water the next day, which tested positive for fentanyl, that’s when they became more concerned and contacted him.
Richards tells KRDO13 the incident commander said they’d like to shut the event down to prevent any further risks, and he said it’s up to you, but I support it wholeheartedly.
So he says, as a group, they came to the conclusion to shut down the event, and although some are upset, he’s grateful there were no serious injuries. Richards says the incident commanders were proactive and took the right steps to handle the incident.
Richards says with 1,400-1,500 people at the event, the possibility of someone non-consensually drugging others was highly concerning, especially with how deadly fentanyl is. He says there were multiple EMTs at the festival, along with a local fire department on scene for nearly the entire event.
Apogaea says that to their knowledge, no one was dosed or harmed physically at the event, and there were zero medical transports from the site during the event.
Chinese app sits at the center of fentanyl epidemic, NC attorney general says
Read the original article on the Charlotte Observer website.
At the center of the fentanyl crisis sits a Chinese messaging app, six attorneys general said in a letter to the encrypted platform Monday.
WeChat could face criminal charges for allowing dealers and money launderers to seamlessly funnel billions between Mexican cartels, Chinese money laundering organizations and U.S. dealers, said North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson in Charlotte Monday.
Jackson and five other attorneys general in a published letter are demanding the company by June 11 describe “what steps, if any, WeChat has taken in response to (evidence) of WeChat being used to facilitate money laundering by fentanyl traffickers.”
Jackson posted the letter on his office’s website following the Charlotte news conference Monday. It also was signed by attorneys general from as far away as Colorado to as close as South Carolina.
The China-based app used by billions of people in China and nearly 20 million in the United States could face criminal charges under North Carolina’s new anti-money laundering law, public nuisance law or federal law, Jackson said.
Read the rest of the article on the Charlotte Observer website.
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Reporter’s notebook: 8 theories why fentanyl deaths are plummeting
Read the original article on the NPR website.
Over the past six months, I’ve been tracking something really cool and mysterious happening on American streets. For the first time in 30 years, drug deaths are plunging at a rate that addiction experts say is hopeful — but also baffling.
In the past, even the most ambitious, well-funded efforts to slow drug deaths only helped a little bit. Reducing fatal overdoses by 8% or 9% was seen as a huge win.
But now, deaths nationwide plunged more than 26% from the peak in June 2023, according to the latest preliminary data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That means roughly 30,000 fewer people a year are dying. Many states are seeing even bigger improvements of 30% to 50%. In some states, progress has been sustained since 2021 and 2022, which suggests this isn’t a temporary blip.
So how did the U.S. finally turn the corner on drug deaths?
What’s going on? No one knows for sure, but here are eight leading theories I hear from experts.
- Naloxone, also known as Narcan, may be the game-changer. The Biden administration raced to make this medication, a nasal spray that quickly reverses opioid and fentanyl overdoses, far more widely available. People can buy it now over the counter without a prescription. It’s distributed for free in many high-risk communities, and people using drugs often carry it. It’s unclear how many lives naloxone is saving each year, but many front-line public health workers tell me the impact is huge. Learn more here.
- Weaker fentanyl. Street fentanyl is incredibly potent. But in many parts of the U.S., organizations that test fentanyl doses sold by drug dealers — often in pill form — have found a significant drop in purity. No one’s sure why drug cartels have changed their mixtures. Some researchers believe law enforcement pressure in China, Mexico and the U.S. is disrupting the black market fentanyl supply chain. Learn more here.
- A dangerous but less lethal street drug supply. In most of the the U.S., gangs are selling complicated “cocktails” of street drugs. The amount of fentanyl appears to be dropping (see above), while the amount of animal tranquilizers, such as medetomidine and xylazine, is rising. These chemicals are highly toxic. They cause skin wounds, severe withdrawal symptoms and other long-term health problems. But doctors and addiction experts generally agree they aren’t as immediately lethal as fentanyl. That could mean more chronic illness but fewer fatal overdoses. Learn more here.
- Better public health. Thirty years after the U.S. opioid crisis began — and a decade after fentanyl spread nationwide — the U.S. has made strides developing better and more affordable services for people experiencing addiction. Medications that reduce opioid cravings, including buprenorphine and methadone, are more widely available, in part because of insurance coverage provided by Medicaid. In many states, roughly $50 billion in opioid settlement money paid out by corporations is also starting to help. Going forward, it’s unclear how the Trump administration’s deep cuts to public health agencies and grants will affect this new addiction safety net. Learn more here.
- Many of the most vulnerable people have already died. This theory is discounted by some researchers I talk to, but many addiction experts think it’s a factor. Over the past five years, the U.S. has been losing roughly 110,000 people to fatal drug overdoses every year. It’s possible drug deaths are declining in part because a heartbreaking number of people using fentanyl and other high-risk street drugs simply didn’t survive. Learn more here.
- Waning effect of the COVID pandemic. The isolation, trauma and disruption of addiction treatment programs that followed the onset of COVID in 2020 overlap with the most devastating years of drug overdose deaths. Many public health experts believe the pandemic deepened the catastrophic impacts of fentanyl. According to this theory, as the impacts of COVID continue to fade, deadly overdoses are also declining to a more “normal” level. Learn more here.
- People are using fentanyl (and other high risk street drugs) more skillfully. This is a common theory among people who use street drugs. They often tell me they’ve adapted to the risks of fentanyl by smoking rather than injecting the drug, which many addiction experts believe is safer (though still incredibly dangerous). People try to never use fentanyl alone and often carry naloxone or Narcan to reverse overdoses. Many people use test strips to identify unwanted contaminants in their drugs and use smaller fentanyl doses. Learn more here.
- A decline in young people using drugs. Street fentanyl has emerged as a leading cause of death among young people in the U.S., age 18 to 45. But research suggests far fewer young people and teenagers are using drugs (other than cannabis). This trend matters because new users have low physical tolerance for opioids such as fentanyl, which means they’re more likely to overdose and potentially die. Fewer young users means fewer people taking that risk. Learn more here.
It’s important to emphasize all of these theories are just that — theories. Most researchers, doctors and front-line care providers say they need more data and more time to understand a shift this large.
But there is a growing, tentative consensus that the answer may well be “all of the above.”
A big question going forward is How low will U.S. drug deaths go? We’ve already seen the biggest, fastest drop in U.S. history. So far, there’s no sign the improvement is slowing.
Bipartisan pair of senators reintroduce bill to expand fentanyl testing in hospitals
Read the original article on the NBC News website.
First to NBC News: The bill from Sens. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Jim Banks, R-Ind., is called “Tyler’s Law,” named after a California teenager who died following a fentanyl overdose.
WASHINGTON — Nearly seven years after Tyler Shamash, a 19-year-old from California, died following a fentanyl overdose, a bill that his mother says could have prevented his death is getting renewed focus nearly 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.
Shamash overdosed a few days before he died while he was living at a sober living house in 2018. His mom, Juli Shamash, was told he tested negative for drugs because the five-panel tox screen doesn’t test for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.
“Had we known, we could have sent him to a place with a higher level of care, instead of the sober living home where he died,” Juli Shamash said in a statement.
She said she believes the doctor didn’t know that fentanyl isn’t included in the standard test run in emergency rooms across the country, which tests for marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, PCP and natural and semisynthetic opioids, but not synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Sens. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Jim Banks, R-Ind., on Tuesday reintroduced the bill, called “Tyler’s Law,” that would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to provide hospitals with guidance on implementing fentanyl testing in routine ER drug screens, according to a news release first shared with NBC News.
In the House, Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., Bob Latta, R-Ohio, and Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., also reintroduced the legislation Tuesday.
Juli Shamash said, “This bill will save lives in situations like Tyler’s, as well as in cases where people are brought into an ER for an overdose of one substance, but they unknowingly consumed fentanyl from a poisoned product.”
Continue reading “Bipartisan pair of senators reintroduce bill to expand fentanyl testing in hospitals”Deadliest phase of fentanyl crisis eases, as all states see recovery
The deadliest phase of the street fentanyl crisis appears to have ended, as drug deaths continue to drop at an unprecedented pace. For the first time, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have now seen at least some recovery.
Read the original article on the NPR website.
A new analysis of U.S. overdose data conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also found that the decline in deaths began much earlier than once understood, suggesting improvements may be sustainable.
ABC News “Start Here” Podcast features two North Carolina families
Overdose or Murder, Part 1: The Worst Call A Parent Can Get
When someone dies from a drug overdose, who should we blame? And how should they be punished? In Part 1 of this special “Start Here” series, ABC’s Camille Petersen explores the nationwide rise of drug-induced homicide laws, which allow for criminal charges against whoever gave or sold someone the drugs that caused their death. She takes us to North Carolina, where two families grapple with the pain and promise of these new laws.
Overdose or Murder, Part 2: ‘Perfect’ Justice?
Some families believe drug-induced homicide laws are a powerful form of justice. Others worry the laws will do more harm than good. In Part 2 of this special “Start Here” series, ABC’s Camille Petersen explores the fierce debate over these laws and how they may continue shaping our response to overdose deaths.