U.S. Sees Record Drop in Drug Overdose Deaths

The decline in overdose deaths is good news, but it stems not from government action but government inaction.

In the summer of 2020, Ohio medical examiner Anahi Ortiz was receiving more bodies than her office could process. The cause of death wasn’t COVID-19; it was drug overdoses. Over just 36 hours, Ortiz’s small office handled nine fatal overdoses at one point.

“We’ve literally run out of wheeled carts to put them on,” Ortiz told the Washington Post.

The fatalities were part of a year that saw 92,478 deaths from overdoses nationwide, a record at the time and a 30% increase from the preceding 12-month period. The drug overdose epidemic only got worse from there. Deaths rose from 107,573 in 2021 to 109,413 in 2022. By summer 2023, they hit a record 111,466 — up 50% from 2019.

Even prior to the pandemic surge, public health officials were calling the opioid epidemic the “most serious public health crisis” in America. These declarations were not mere hyperbole. As the New York Times reported, drug overdoses surged to account for more American deaths than guns and automobile accidents combined.

Fortunately, after decades of bad news on drug overdoses, there’s some good news. Earlier this week, Axios reported that drug overdose deaths fell to an estimated 80,391 in 2024, a 27% drop from 2023 and the lowest total since 2019.

In other words, the United States just saw its largest decline in drug overdoses in history. Though the story has received relatively little attention, some are asking an important question: How did this happen?

Speaking to CNN, Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, admitted that it’s “difficult to pinpoint” what drove the decline. But several experts, including Ciccarone, argued that federal programs might finally be paying off.

A more convincing explanation is Ciccarone’s other hypothesis: that we may be witnessing “some regression to the mean after the spike in overdose deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

This is no doubt closer to the truth, but Ciccarone’s hypothesis is incomplete. To blame the virus for the surge in drug overdoses overlooks the role government policy played in the overdose epidemic.

In his bestselling book Chasing the Scream, British writer Johann Hari explores the human struggle against addiction (including his own drug addiction). He concluded that isolation is deadly to addicts, a thesis supported by an abundance of scientific evidence. (This includes “Rat Park,” a groundbreaking series of experiments conducted in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander that showed the environment plays a key role in addiction.)

“Addiction,” writes Hari, “is a disease of loneliness.”

The government’s lockdown policy, though aimed at public health, deprived millions of the human connection on which they depended. For too many, isolation proved fatal. Rates of drug abuse, alcoholism, and suicide surged as people were cut off from the relationships essential to mental and emotional survival.

This human cost was not lost on those who designed the government’s pandemic response.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that lockdowns could do “irreparable damage” to Americans and have severe “consequences for health.” Fauci, nevertheless, continued to advise a heavy-handed government response.

“Sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences,” he would later say.

The state bears responsibility for these “negative consequences,” yet some are now trying to give credit to the government for the decline in drug overdoses. This takes chutzpah.

In 1982, when President Ronald Reagan escalated the War on Drugs — originally launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971 — he labeled drug abuse “a threat to national security.” At that time, there were about 2,900 drug overdose deaths annually. By 2000, that number had soared to over 17,000, and by 2017, fatal overdoses surpassed 70,000.

To now say, as CNN does, that “federal cuts could threaten” the trend of declining overdoses is rich. Even Reagan supporters (among whom I count myself) must concede that the historical record is clear: The federal government spent more than $1 trillion in its drug war only to see fatal drug overdoses increase exponentially.

The decline in overdose deaths is good news, but it stems not from government action but government inaction — the elimination of the top-down policies that fueled the surge in overdoses in the first place. The COVID-19 pandemic, which federal authorities now concede was likely caused by government meddling, showed over and over that the state is far better at causing problems than fixing them.

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This article originally appeared in The Washington Examiner.