The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on May 14 that the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States dropped by nearly 27 percent in 2024. The number represents a significant decrease after more than a decade of steeply climbing drug-related fatality rates that billions of dollars in federal spending on policing and border enforcement failed to contain.

At the beginning of 2015, the CDC reported fewer than 50,000 overdose deaths annually. By 2021, that number had surpassed 100,000 before peaking at 111,451 during the summer of 2023. The CDC found massive racial disparities in the data, with the number of deaths recorded between 2019 and 2020 falling among white populations with better access to public health interventions while skyrocketing in Black and Indigenous communities where heavy policing trumped health care, for example.

Each of the 80,391 overdose deaths recorded in 2024 is a tragedy and policy failure, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 44. However, local data aggregated by the CDC shows decreases in drug fatality rates across all 50 states compared to peak levels, and from 2023 to 2024, deaths linked to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids fell from an estimated 76,282 to 48,422 nationally. The number of deaths linked to stimulants also dropped.

“If you look at the CDC graph, the peak month in the overdose death data was June of 2023 or July, so if we use the peak as the starting point, then we are down 30 percent off of the peak,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina’s Injury Prevention Research Center and opioid data lab, in an interview.