About 70,000 Americans perished from drug overdoses in 2025 — about 14% fewer than the previous year, according to preliminary government data.
By Catholic for Catholics
The percentage of Americans who have died from overdoses went down last year, according to preliminary government data.
About 70,000 Americans perished from drug overdoses in 2025 — about 14% fewer than the previous year, according to preliminary government data.
According to a story by Newsmax, it was the third straight yearly decline, marking the longest sustained descent in decades, according to federal data released Wednesday. The 2025 total is about the same as the tally in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Declines were seen across a number of drug types, including fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine. Overdose deaths fell in big states, although there were notable increases in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that this represents really a fundamental change in the arc of the overdose crisis,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends.
Nevertheless, the amount of Americans dying from overdoses is still high, and several factors could cause deaths to rise again — including government policy changes or a shift in the drug supply, Marshall and other researchers say.
“If deaths are going down rapidly, that means they can increase just as rapidly if we take our foot off the gas,” Marshall said.
For decades, U.S. overdose deaths rose, but they shot up radically during the pandemic, peaking at nearly 110,000 in 2022. The pandemic spike was associated with social isolation and difficulties accessing addiction treatment.
Deaths lowered as the pandemic waned. Researchers have pointed to several possible factors: an increase in the availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, expanded addiction treatment, shifts in how people use drugs, and the growing impact of billions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlement money.
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