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Experts hopeful as US drug overdose deaths fall below 100,000

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The number of people dying from drug overdoses in the US has decreased, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a new report.

Overall, overdose deaths declined by roughly 14% from June 2023 to June 2024.

It's an encouraging sign, experts say. Overdose deaths had been on a steady rise since the 1990s, with a jump during the pandemic, according to CDC data.

More than 108,000 people died from overdose deaths in the 12 months leading up to both June 2022 and 2023, but by this June that number had dropped to 97,000.

"While these data are cause for optimism, we must not lose sight of the fact that nearly 100,000 people are still estimated to be dying annually from drug overdose in the US," said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a statement to CBS, the BBC's US partner.

Some of the states that saw the largest rates of decrease were North Carolina (-30%), Ohio (-24%) and Virginia (-23%).

The decline marks a notable change in overdose trends that have troubled the US for three decades, initially fuelled by prescription opioids and later by the rise of heroin and synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

Prescription opioids overdose deaths rose sharply from 3,442 in 1999 to 17,029 in 2017. Deaths declined afterwards but rose again in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic amid increasing social isolation.

Experts are unsure of what exactly is causing the current decline in overdose deaths but attribute some of it to a post-pandemic return to normalcy.

Money going into the hardest hit communities has increased the availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone and addiction treatments such as buprenorphine.

Billions of dollars in legal settlements against opioid companies are also suspected to be playing a role in the decrease.

In the latest CDC data, overdose death reports are down in most US states, though some did see an increase.

In Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington the number of overdose death reports rose.