Massachusetts Opioid Deaths Fell Below 1,000. The People Doing the Work Say the Win Has a Hole in It.

Julie MacDonald runs the program at Living in Recovery in Massachusetts, and talking to a reporter about falling death counts, she went straight to the part nobody was cheering. A lot of people, she told WAMC, went off opiates and then started using kratom. Now the state has banned it. “People are going to return to opiates,” she said.

A record low in deaths is a statement about the dead, and it says less than people want it to about the living.

The number itself is real and it is big. Massachusetts reported 978 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2025, the first count under 1,000 since 2013, a 27% drop from 2024 and a decline of about 60% from the 2022 peak of 2,364. The state’s addiction services director, Deirdre Calvert, put it this way: behind every data point is a person. State officials credit more than $1 billion in overdose spending since 2023, including 150,000 naloxone kits and 400,000 fentanyl test strips handed out in fiscal 2025, plus an 8% rise in methadone treatment enrollment between 2023 and 2024.

Here is what the same coverage is honest about. Officials listed three possible reasons for the decline, and only one of them is something a person did on purpose. The first is a change in the drug supply, with fentanyl concentrations flattening or falling. The second is a shrinking pool of people at highest risk, through tolerance, abstinence or death. The third is the prevention and treatment work. Nobody can say how much credit each deserves, and “death” is on the list of explanations for why the numbers fell.

Meanwhile, the people on the front line are describing a different map. Peer support specialist Loretta Scapin told WAMC that many people don’t realize cannabis can become an addiction. Volunteer coordinator Wolf Valentin called methamphetamine “the new crack,” cheaper and made from household ingredients. WAMC cites an NIH study finding that injection methamphetamine use in Boston doubled between 2015 and 2018. The medications that helped drive the opioid decline do nothing for a person whose problem is meth, and no drug is approved for it.

If you work in a program here, the move this week is to check what you actually offer someone who comes in for stimulants and not opioids, and to ask your team about the kratom withdrawal gap we flagged yesterday. If you use, the plain thing that has not changed: naloxone still works on the opioid part of what is out there, and the state’s own figures say it handed out 150,000 kits last fiscal year, so ask for one.

A falling number is a gift to the families it spared. It is not a plan for the person sitting in MacDonald’s program tomorrow morning, whose substance changed and whose treatment did not.