HHS Is Claiming the Overdose Decline. Arizona, Where Deaths Rose, Isn't Invited to the Victory Lap.

Kimberly Douglas founded Black Moms Against Overdose, and when the CDC’s numbers came in this spring she did not pretend to know every reason deaths were dropping. She told the Associated Press what she did know: “We are starting to see overdoses go down in some places and that’s because of harm reduction.”

On Monday, two officials at the Department of Health and Human Services offered a different list of reasons.

Nobody gets to claim a decline nobody can explain, least of all while defunding the parts of it we can see.

In an October 12 op-ed in RealClearHealth, Gary Andres and Alyssa Bretan, who work in HHS’s legislative office, wrote that “the direction has changed, and that progress warrants attention.” They cite CDC provisional counts (early numbers that get revised) of 67,798 overdose deaths in the 12 months ending March 2026, down 12.3% from a year earlier. We could not match that figure on the CDC’s dashboard today, so treat it as HHS’s number, not a confirmed one. To their credit, the authors write that “those numbers do not mean the crisis is over,” and concede it is “difficult to assign the recent decline” to any single enforcement action.

That concession matters. The AP’s reporting on the CDC’s 2025 numbers found about 70,000 deaths, roughly 14% fewer than 2024, a third straight annual drop, back to roughly the 2019 total and down from a peak near 110,000 in 2022. The explanations on the table: wider naloxone, more treatment, shifts in what people use, opioid settlement money, fewer teens starting, and less precursor chemical from China. Brandon Marshall of Brown University called himself “cautiously optimistic” and added the line worth keeping: “If deaths are going down rapidly, that means they can increase just as rapidly if we take our foot off the gas.”

Not everywhere is falling. In the same CDC data, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico rose by 10% or more. Marshall suggested more people combining fentanyl and methamphetamine may be part of it, which is a guess, not a finding. Our earlier reporting on Arizona’s rise has the local detail. Meanwhile SAMHSA has told grantees it will no longer pay for test strips and kits that detect dangerous additives in the drug supply.

If you run or refer to a program in Arizona, take one thing to your next team meeting: whose job is it to know how many naloxone kits are physically in the building, and when did anyone last count?

And if you use, here is the part that is still yours: naloxone is sold over the counter, no prescription, and the FDA approved another over-the-counter spray in June, per the HHS authors. Keep it where the people around you can find it.

A falling number is not a person staying alive. Douglas said “some places,” and she was right about the places and about why.