HHS Says Opioid Deaths Are at a Decade Low. The Number It Led With Isn't an Opioid Number.

On Tuesday, October 27, HHS released a report that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boiled down to one sentence: “Those actions are saving lives and driving opioid deaths to the lowest in nearly a decade.” The number that anchored the coverage was 689.2. According to Just the News, that is the CDC’s provisional age-adjusted death rate for 2025, per 100,000 people, for deaths from every cause. It is not an overdose rate. It is not an opioid rate.

The headline number measures all deaths, not opioid deaths, and nobody should be handed a victory lap built on it.

Here is what is true, and you should hear it plainly because it is good news. Overdose deaths averaged more than 100,000 a year from 2021 to 2024, and HHS’s materials put the most recent 12-month count under 70,000. The CDC’s provisional overdose counts, last reviewed October 14, are the place to check the current figure yourself, and you should, because the coverage I could find gives no opioid-specific rate at all. That coverage also names no outside expert and, in the words of the Just the News write-up, does not address what caused the decline. Prescriptions dispensed falling to 45.3 percent of their March 2015 level is a fact. Whether that, the street supply, naloxone, or buprenorphine did the work is a separate question the report as covered leaves unanswered.

The place the average hides things is stimulants. Minnesota’s health department reported this week that opioid-involved overdose deaths fell to 671 in 2025, down from a peak of 1,039 in 2022. Total overdose deaths still rose 3 percent, to 1,025, which the department ties to methamphetamine and cocaine. One state is not the country, and we covered the same split in Minnesota and Kentucky earlier this week. But it is the shape to look for in your own county’s numbers: the opioid line falling while the total line refuses to.

If you run intake for a program, do one thing this week. Pull your last twelve months of screening forms and count how many asked about stimulants as a primary substance, not a checkbox under “other.” If the answer is few, add the question before your next team meeting and bring the Minnesota split with you.

If you use, keep naloxone on you either way. It reverses opioid overdoses only, and that is still the case no matter what any report says about the trend.

A rate is a way of not looking at anyone. The person next to you in the waiting room was never a denominator, and what they use matters more than what the average says.