An estimated 86,882 people in the United States died of overdose between October 2023 and September 2024, according to provisional data announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on February 25.
It represents an unprecedented 23.7 decrease from the 113,919 deaths in the provisional data from in the previous 12-month period. It’s on track to be the lowest death count since July 2020, when the final tally for the previous 12 months was 85,236.
Whatever it is will still be historically high, and represent lives lost rather than lives saved, even though various media may characterize it as the latter. A death count of 80,000-plus is a crisis; death counts of 100,000-plus are not the norm.
The national average reflects uneven progress at the state level. In some jurisdictions, overdose deaths continue to increase. Overdose is still the leading cause of accidental deaths in the US, killing nearly as many people each year as the second and third causes combined (falls and car accidents, respectively).
Compared to the predicted (not final) data from the 12-month period leading up to September 2023, the state with by far the greatest decrease was in North Carolina, where deaths dropped by over 50 percent—from 4,307 people to 2,142. Alaska showed an increase of 16.92 percent. Other states where the overdose rate appears to still be going up are South Dakota (+3.66 percent); Montana (+3.91 percent); Utah (+4.99 percent); and Nevada (+11.3 percent).
Nationally, provisional death counts tend to be about 3,000 higher than the final tally.
Because percentages are not numbers, it’s easier to give the impression of a dramatic change in states that record very few overdose deaths. In South Dakota, the state with the lowest numbers, a 3.91 percent increase in the 12 months leading up to September 2024 reflects a change from 82 deaths to 85.
California predicted the highest number of deaths at 10,286, a 20.4-percent decrease compared to the 12,918 deaths predicted from the same time period the year before. Population size is obviously the biggest factor, but it’s also important to keep in mind that all of this data originate at the local level, which in most states means they’re submitted from individual counties that don’t share any kind of standardized system. So some figures inevitably reflect data collection that’s less thorough in some jurisdictions than others, and not just a low number of overdose deaths.
The data didn’t include demographic breakdowns, but did include additional details about classes of drugs associated with the deaths. The decrease corresponds primarily to fentanyl-involved deaths.
Nationally, the CDC’s provisional death counts tend to be about 3,000 higher than the final tally that comes a few months later. As of February 25, the number of deaths that have actually been reported for October 2023 to September 2024 was 84,334.
The first reports of a national decrease in overdose deaths appeared in September 2024, when the CDC published data for the 12-month period ending in April 2024. In the remaining months of the Biden administration, the Office of National Drug Control Policy repeatedly took credit for the turnaround (President Donald Trump, still campaigning at the time, promptly claimed that overdose had gone up 18 percent thanks to opponent Kamala Harris).
Trump has not yet commented publicly on the new data. Nor has the ONDCP, as its website was archived when he took office.
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