The ‘horrific’ reason why fentanyl deaths are falling

Deaths from fentanyl appear to be falling for the first time in a decade after reaching astronomical levels, but experts warn this is for ‘horrific’ reasons.

They say the drug has simply run out of people to kill after claiming the lives of more than 100,000 Americans in the past decade.

Drug overdoses have killed about 107,000 Americans last year, down from a peak of 77,693 last summer.

In King County, which includes Seattle, a microcosm for the rest of the country, deaths fell nearly 10 percent at the end of 2023 compared to the previous quarter.

But Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, an addiction expert at the University of Washington, said this could be because so many users are already dead.

Seattle, Washington, has been called a hub for synthetic drugs like fentanyl. Experts warned that while deaths in the area are declining, it may be for the wrong reasons (pictured is a man smoking fentanyl in Seattle in 2022)

The graph above shows the number of Americans who die from synthetic drug overdoses each week. These are deaths due to fentanyl. After years of rising, deaths across the country have finally reached a plateau

He told the local news channel KUOW: ‘There are only so many people who take a drug, and if it is that deadly, it will eventually – in a truly gruesome way – extinguish itself, just like a forest fire.

“So the fuel has literally burned out. The terrible thing in this case is that the fuel is people.’

Earlier this year, the CDC reported that drug overdose deaths fell by three percent between 2023 and 2022. This was the first annual decline since 2018.

There were 65,787 deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses in the U.S. in April 2024, up from a peak of 77,693 in June 2023, according to the latest available data.

Washington state was previously considered a hotspot for fentanyl overdoses.

According to a December 2023 CDC report, the state experienced a 41 percent increase in drug overdose deaths, which experts said was largely due to fentanyl and xylazine, the “zombie drug.”

In 2022, nearly 56 children in Washington state’s foster care and child welfare system died or died after taking illegal drugs, including fentanyl. This was as much as the total for 2019 to 2021 combined.

Of the 56 cases, fentanyl was involved in 38 cases.

Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, an addiction expert at the University of Washington, said the decline in synthetic opioid deaths in Seattle could be due to the drug running out of people to kill.

The above graph shows how synthetic opioid deaths in fentanyl hotspot Washington have slowly declined since January, the most recent data available.

However, rates have slowly fallen since the end of last year. According to the most recent CDC data, there were 2,632 deaths from synthetic opioids in April 2024, down slightly from a peak of 2,727 in February 2024.

Dr. Banta-Green also pointed to a decline in the number of hubs along the East Coast, such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

West Virginia, which has been plagued by the opioid crisis for more than three decades, reported 1,002 deaths from synthetic opioids in April 2024, down from 1,169 in September 2023. The Mountain State saw a peak of 1,263 in April 2021.

Pennsylvania is also in the spotlight for increasing fentanyl use and deaths, especially in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood.

In 2022, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health recorded 1,413 unintentional overdose deaths, an 11 percent increase from 2021.

In West Virginia, which has been plagued by the opioid epidemic for 30 years, death rates from synthetic opioids have also fallen, according to the chart above.

And the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimates that eight in 10 of these overdoses were due to fentanyl.

The CDC has no data on synthetic opioid overdoses in Pennsylvania; the state reported a total of 4,721 drug overdose deaths in 2023, a nine percent decrease from 2022.

Dr. Banta-Green said: “I hope we continue to see a decline, but I hope that the future decline is not because people are dying, but because they are getting access to the really wonderful life-saving interventions that we make really great. steps have been taken to make it more widely available.’