Shortly after writing our last blog post, the CDC released provisional data showing overdose deaths declining by almost 27% in 2024! For years, we lost more and more people every year, and now we’ve seen a significant drop, which is fantastic. What caused it?
The short answer is, we don’t have a clear picture yet. The longer answer is that numerous factors are working together, including expanded access to harm reduction tools.
The term “harm reduction” has become polarizing if you watch the news, but it’s helpful to remember that we all use harm reduction every single day in many areas of our lives.
Imagine taking a beach trip with your family, for example. Hopefully you’ll wear seat belts on the drive down. You might use sunscreen at the beach. If there’s a shark sighting, you’ll quickly get out of the water. Driving, sun exposure, and water are all risky activities. Instead of banning them all, society has embraced harm reduction for them.
Harm reduction is just reducing the risk of risky activities.
Fentanyl testing strips were thought, just a few years ago, to encourage drug use. Now it’s widely accepted that they’re a common-sense way to reduce harm, by allowing people to test the drugs they’re about to use. Strips save lives.
The opioid overdose reversal medication naloxone has saturated many areas now. You can even find it in Costco pharmacies in suburban Mississippi. Again, this doesn’t encourage drug use, it just offers a way to reduce harm and save lives.
Here in Mississippi and in other states, we’ve expanded access to Medication-Assisted Treatment, including telehealth options. Our State Health Officer, Dr. Dan Edney, just joined us on the End It For Good podcast to talk about harm reduction, MAT, and his commitment to these strategies because … they work. The benefit is in the name. They reduce harm.
Even while we’re celebrating the great news that far fewer people died of overdose last year, we still lost over 80,000 people. Eighty thousand families are grieving. Eighty thousand futures have been lost.
The day after the CDC released its provisional 2024 data on the decrease in overdose deaths, James Moore, a local businessman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, switched out the flag on his flagpole and flew a purple one at half mast in memory of a young woman in their community who lost her battle with addiction.
The work is far from over.
New drugs hit the streets all the time, and as long as we refuse to allow regulated markets for many popular drugs, they will be contaminated, potent, and sold with no age restrictions. We can celebrate what harm reduction is doing while still working to solve the root causes of the problem.
That means more people need to know why punitive approaches increase harm, and why health-centered ones can decrease it. We don’t want to just bring awareness to the problem of drug-related harm generally. People already know! What they don’t know is why that harm exists.
We all have the capacity to educate the people around us.
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Thank you for being part of this movement! There is no quick fix, but there are solutions, and the only way to bring them about is one step at a time. It is an honor for our team to partner with you to take as many of those steps as we can, as quickly as possible, to protect more lives and families.