Good news in the front of the worst drug crisis in the history of the United States. Overdose deaths fell in the country by 27% in 2024, the greatest decrease since 45 years ago registration is saved. In total, about 80,000 people died, compared to about 110.00 last year, according to provisional data provided Wednesday by the Governmental Agency CDC (acronym in English for centers for disease control and prevention). The numbers are thus at levels prior to the pandemic.
The report does not argue causes for that decrease, but drug experts point out as possible reasons the awareness of the danger of the fentanyl, a powerful opioid responsible for three quarters of overdose, campaigns to alert young people of the risk of taking drugs of doubtful origin or success of damage prevention policies. This group includes measures such as the distribution of syringes among users and, above all, the distribution without recipe for naloxone inhalers, the best antidote against fentanyl overdose and reactive strips to detect substances such as that or xyilazine (known as tranq, o Zombie drug, and that enhances the effects of fentanyl and aggravates its harmful effects) on cocaine or methamphetamine.
There is also another explanation, that maybe it sounds too macabre: fentanil may simply have killed so much so far that there are no longer so many candidates to fall into their claws are less and less. We must also take into account the millionaire agreements to which the judges have forced the pharmaceuticals who created with their medications and their bad practices the beginning of the opioid crisis in the nineties. It is estimated that in the last decade these compensation have promoted to 50,000 million dollars, which have been invested in programs to fight addiction in the most devastated regions.
Falls in all states except two
The fall in the death toll is widespread: there were fewer deaths in all states except two, Nebraska and Dakota del Sur, which registered small increases. Symbolic places such as Ohio or Virginia Occidental, scenarios in which the fentanyl crisis began in the last decade, recorded the greatest falls.
The good data, which arrive after last year the first fall, of 3.7% in five years, are still provisional. That statistic reversed a trend that is far from being counteracted: the dead due to overdose grew 30% between 2019 and 2020, and 15% between 2020 and 2021. In 2022, the record was recorded, with 111,029 dead the known numbers this Wednesday invite you to think that what seemed like a flattening of the curve could be the beginning of the end of an epidemic Americans.
It remains to be seen how the policies of the new administration of Donald Trump will affect the combat of drug addiction, which prevails in the face of other prevention measures the hard hand against drug trafficking, with decisions such as designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, imposing tariffs to punish countries to which the facent crisis (Mexico, China and Canada) or closing borders. The cut in public money launched by the Elon Musk (Doge) government efficiency department threatens to reverse advances in the front of damage mitigation.
Trump, on the other hand, has a long history to use fentanil as a weapon with which to take political benefit. He likes to swell the deaths caused by that drug (until he ensures that the number of casualties amounts to 300,000 per year), and also presume that when he was in the White House the first time there were less dead. The truth is that when he lost the elections in November 2020 the curve was growing exponentially, and continued to do so until he reached his peak in the middle of Joe Biden’s mandate. All experts agree that, more than the ideology of the person in command, one of the causes that triggered the consumption of fentanyl and other synthetic dorms was pandemic.
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