It's good to have good news. Of course, one reason is that they'd jumped so high quickly. Still above what they were pre-Covid. But at least they dropped a lot. U.S. overdose deaths fell by 27% last year — the largest one-year decline ever recorded AP story: https://kstp.com/world/us-overdose-deaths-fell-27-last-year-the-largest-one-year-decline-ever-seen/
I'm not sure if it's factual but I saw something the other day where The generation that's turning 21 drinks 83% less than previous generations.
We may have set the bar a bit too high... Of my eight 20 something nieces and nephews, one of them like to drink.
Not surprising when young men are turning to Trumpism and listening to chodes like Andrew Taint and Jordan Peterson, treat women like abject garbage, and then wonder why no one wants to sleep with them. The incel generation.
Agreed. To my understanding, the three largest contributors being: - Narcan - increased education - improved / smaller doses from source Still taking too many lives, but I'll gladly take trends in the right direction.
The price of bar drinks for college students on a budget, plus the cost of a DUI... it's better to drink at home hopefully, not alone.
1 part vodka in a plastic bottle, 4 parts Polar seltzer (flavor - dealers choice) and voila ... homemade Whiteclaws!
Apparently Trump and DOGE are doing their best to reverse the trend. Gutting the Government Could Reignite the Drug Overdose Epidemic The nation’s drug overdose crisis is finally beginning to slow down. After it reached a peak during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been substantial declines in overdose deaths over the past two years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that from 2023 to 2024, there was a 24 percent drop in overdose deaths. This is good news, and while we don’t know exactly what caused the decline, investments in overdose prevention, treatment, and health care supports certainly played a role. But not everyone is on the same page. Despite the secretary’s acknowledgment of the ongoing crisis, this progress is now imperiled by recent cuts that have been made to the workforce of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, by DOGE. It may be one of the smallest agencies in the federal government, but on the public health front, it’s been delivering bang for the buck, at least until now. In the recent round of cuts, SAMHSA reportedly lost more than 10 percent of its staff—100 probationary staffers out of a workforce of more than 600. These cuts may seem insignificant, but SAMHSA plays an outsize role in the federal government’s response to the overdose crisis. The agency awards millions of dollars in grants to behavioral health care clinics, overdose prevention and outreach programs, substance use disorder treatment and recovery services, and tribal health care services, to name a few. These programs go beyond just monetary support, as SAMHSA provides training and technical assistance to these organizations as well. For instance, its Center for Addiction and Recovery Support helps to train peer recovery support specialists (people who are in recovery who can assist others with substance use disorder). According to agency estimates, this agency trained around 2,500 people in 2024. Perhaps most importantly, SAMHSA ensures that opioid treatment providers, or OTPs, stay in compliance with federal regulations; a disruption to that workforce could have detrimental impacts on the ability of OTPs to operate. Finally, SAMHSA also provides services directly to individuals—namely, the 988 National Suicide and Crisis Line; employees who helped operate this line were reportedly laid off. Cuts to the SAMHSA workforce are the most critical for people directly impacted by the overdose crisis, but as jobs are rapidly and indiscriminately eliminated across the government in health care—from the CDC to the Department of Veterans Affairs—we can expect similar impacts across many other groups. Cuts to SAMHSA also go beyond its workforce—on Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was cutting $1 billion in grants from SAMHSA to states, affecting state health departments that heavily rely on federal funding.
