On February 9, New Mexico state senators will discuss a proposal to study the feasibility of overdose prevention centers (OPC). Weeks after new overdose mortality data revealed that the death rate in New Mexico is already going back up, a new bill calls for the state “look to new harm reduction strategies to reverse the current trend.”
SM 21 was introduced by Senator Heather Berghmans (D) and is currently in the Rules Committee, of which Berghmans is a member. The legislation would require the state health department to “determine the necessary statutory and regulatory framework” and submit a report to the Legislative Health and Human Services committee by November 1.
In late 2023, the rising rate of drug-related deaths in the United States suddenly began to slow, and in 2024 it plummeted by more than 26 percent. For the last few months of 2025, the federal government shutdown had disrupted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s monthly release of provisional overdose death count data, but when the backlogged data were published in January, they revealed that the trajectory of the crisis had again begun to change.
The most recent data cover the crisis up through August 2025. In at least three states—Arizona, Kansas and New Mexico—the number of deaths went up between August 2024 and August 2025. New Mexico had already gone from 833 deaths to 867, an increase of a little over 4 percent; these were the data cited in SM 21.
“[D]rug overdose deaths continue to disproportionately impact communities of color, with rates rising faster among Native American and Black New Mexico residents [and] can be prevented through various harm reduction strategies,” SM 21 states. “[T]he establishment of overdose prevention centers in other jurisdictions has been a particularly effective harm reduction strategy.”
Compared to New Mexico’s 4-percent increase, Arizona’s overdose mortality rate has risen almost 16 percent.
New York City has operated locally authorized OPC since late 2021, but only Rhode Island, Minnesota and Vermont have authorized the facilities at the state level; Minnesota is not acting on that authorization. In 2025, two New Mexico representatives proposed a bill that would have established OPC—as opposed to the preliminary step of a feasibility study—with “full implementation” by 2027, but it did not advance.
In 2014, when fentanyl was just entering the supply and mostly localized on the East Coast, New Mexico still had the second-highest overdose mortality rate behind West Virginia (which has remained the state with the highest rate every year since then). Deaths were then surpassed by those in some East Coast states, but New Mexico continued to report the most consistently high mortality rates of any state in the West. It’s been among the 10 states with the highest rates since 2021.
Almost every state has reported at least 90 percent of overdose death data for each month of 2024, but some have more substantial portions of data still pending, including North Carolina, Oklahoma and Virginia.
After death records are haphazardly recorded at the local level, death data are then unevenly submitted to the CDC, so the preliminary numbers aren’t always the best indication of the final numbers. However, compared to New Mexico’s 4-percent increase, Arizona’s overdose mortality rate has risen almost 16 percent. Arizona has not proposed to authorize or study OPC in the current or any previous session, but in 2025 passed legislation to ban them preemptively.
Image via New York State Senate