by John J. Coleman, PhD – President,\u00a0drug-watch-international – 23 May 2025<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s edition of \u201cThe Drug Report\u201d (by SAM) brings some good news about drug-related overdose deaths. The piece leads with:<\/p>\n
\u201cAccording to estimates from the CDC, the number of overdose deaths declined in 48 states between 2023 and 2024, representing a 26.9% decline. This is equivalent to 81 fewer overdose deaths every day throughout the year. The CDC estimated that there were 80,391 overdose deaths in 2024, down from 110,037 in 2023. Overdose deaths peaked in the 12-month period ending in June 2023, when 114,670 occurred.\u201d (See: The Drug Report)<\/p>\n
This appears to be good news and let\u2019s hope that it is. Several years ago, the CDC\u2019s counting of drug overdose deaths was debunked as fraudulent when it turned out that for more than a decade, CDC was counting fentanyl-related deaths as resulting from prescribed fentanyl, not the street variety. This caused considerable inflation of prescription<\/u> opioid deaths while at the same time diverting away scarce attention (and resources) to street drugs like heroin and fentanyl that were rapidly taking over the market.<\/p>\n
Part of the problem we noticed back then was the agency\u2019s use and reliance upon the ICD-10 for identifying drugs and causes of death. This somewhat obsolete system designed and promulgated by the World Health Organization is not sufficient to monitor drug-involved mortality. For example, codes do not distinguish between methadone used for pain treatment and methadone used to treat opioid use disorders. Consequently, all methadone-involved deaths are considered incorrectly as involving the prescribed variety of the drug. While some may think this is a difference without much distinction, consider that volume-wise, seven times more methadone is used in the U.S. for OUD than for pain.<\/p>\n
And don\u2019t think the CDC wizards didn\u2019t know they had a problem with this. In 2014, the CDC reported that methadone represented 1 percent of opioids prescribed for pain but was involved in 23 percent of all prescription opioid deaths. But, alas, using the ICD-10 codes to characterize drugs, they put all those deaths on the prescribed or administered methadone used for pain, not on the methadone dispensed and administered for OUD.<\/p>\n
So, let\u2019s hope that today\u2019s news about the decline in drug overdose deaths is genuine and not based on some new methodology or novel interpretation that omits important facts. To its credit, in 2018 the CDC published an article in an obscure public health journal in which it admitted issuing incorrect estimates for prescription opioid-related deaths for several years, possibly as long as a decade, because it was counting fentanyl-involved deaths as resulting from the prescribed form, not the street form that was causing the problem. Internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, however, showed that the CDC was well aware of the problem long before it came clean in the journal article.<\/p>\n
John Coleman<\/p>\n
Source: \u00a0www.drugwatch.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by John J. Coleman, PhD – President,\u00a0drug-watch-international – 23 May 2025 Today\u2019s edition of \u201cThe Drug Report\u201d (by SAM) brings some good news about drug-related overdose deaths. The piece leads with: \u201cAccording to estimates from the CDC, the number of overdose deaths declined in 48 states between 2023 and 2024, representing a 26.9% decline. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,119,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drug-use-various-effects","category-prevalence","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}