The Country Is Winning the Overdose Fight. Arizona Is Losing It — and July Is When That Gets Worse.

Steve Harmon works the streets of downtown Phoenix for the Phoenix Rescue Mission, handing out water, hygiene kits, and naloxone. On one recent outreach run, he found a woman who already had a dose of the overdose-reversal drug in her hand. He gave her a second one anyway. Harmon knows this stretch of pavement from both sides. “I hitchhiked here in ‘83 and was on the streets of Phoenix,” he says. “Then fell into addiction, which turned into crime, which turned into prison terms.” He got out. He came back to the same streets to hand out the drug that might have saved him twenty years earlier.

Here is the thing Harmon’s extra dose of naloxone tells you that a national chart cannot: the country’s overdose numbers just had their best year in a generation, and Phoenix is not living inside that good news.

The national overdose count just fell to its lowest point in roughly 25 years. Arizona’s went up. July is when Arizona’s overdose deaths always get worse, and this year it starts from a higher number.

That is not a coincidence of timing. It is two different epidemics running on the same calendar, and if you are using drugs or in recovery in Maricopa County right now, the next eight weeks matter more than the headline about the country getting better.

The National Numbers Are Real — They’re Just Not Arizona’s Numbers

The CDC’s provisional data, released June 17, projects 69,147 overdose deaths nationally for the twelve months ending in January 2026 — a 13.2% decline from the year before. That builds on a run the CDC’s own pressroom confirmed in May: 2025 marked the third straight year of falling overdose deaths, with 69,973 deaths for the calendar year, down nearly 14% from 2024’s 81,313. (“Provisional” means these are early estimates, built before every death certificate is finalized and coded — the CDC will firm up the exact number over the coming months, but the direction is not in question.) States like Rhode Island, New York, North Carolina, Alabama, and Vermont posted declines of 25% or more.

The Washington Post’s analysis, published July 2, put real names on why: naloxone is more available than it has ever been, addiction treatment has expanded, opioid lawsuit settlement money is finally reaching street-level programs, and — the biggest single factor most researchers point to — the fentanyl supply itself got less lethal. Chinese regulatory crackdowns choked off precursor chemicals, and the purity and potency of street fentanyl fell sharply after 2022. Phoenix New Times reporting on Arizona’s own pill seizures shows the same pattern locally: fentanyl pills that used to kill 8 out of 10 people who took them now kill roughly 3 out of 10. That is real progress, hard-won, and worth saying plainly instead of burying in qualifiers.

It is also a national average sitting on top of enormous variation. And Arizona sits on the wrong side of it.

Arizona Is Moving the Opposite Direction

While the country improved, the CDC’s same dataset shows Arizona projected at 2,932 overdose deaths for the twelve months ending in January 2026 — up 11.5%. New Mexico rose 24.1%, to 1,010 deaths. Colorado rose 11.3%, to 1,819. Those are the three states moving in the opposite direction of almost everywhere else in the country, and Arizona and New Mexico are the two moving fastest.

Zoom into Phoenix and the divergence gets sharper. Phoenix New Times reports suspected opioid overdoses in the city climbed from 4,258 in 2024 to 5,942 in 2025 — even as the DEA’s Phoenix field division saw fentanyl powder seizures jump 79% and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office logged more than 5,300 fentanyl-related convictions. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are involved in roughly six in ten of Arizona’s overdose deaths, and USAFacts’ analysis of CDC data puts the state’s 2024 overdose rate at the fifth-highest in the country since 1999 — up 79% since Arizona expanded Medicaid in 2014, and up 22% just since 2019.

Rachel Combs, a 40-year-old Kingman resident, lost her brother to overdose in 2013. In August 2024, her mother Renee Brunhofer died of a fentanyl overdose after being prescribed two different strengths of OxyContin along with fentanyl patches; her stepfather John Brunhofer died the same way. Officers found roughly 1,266 counterfeit “M30” pills in their home. Combs is not a statistic in a CDC table. She is what an 11.5% increase actually costs one family, twice.

Rachel Combs, a 40-year-old Kingman resident, lost her brother to overdose in 2013.

Addiction medicine specialists interviewed by KJZZ point to a supply that’s shifted from counterfeit pills to raw fentanyl powder — harder to dose consistently — plus the spread of xylazine, a veterinary sedative cut into the fentanyl supply that naloxone cannot reverse on its own, and nitazenes, a newer family of synthetic opioids that can be even more potent than fentanyl and hard to detect on standard test strips. Dr. Matt Evans, an addiction medicine director quoted in that piece, also points to something more mundane and more fixable: when people experiencing homelessness get pushed out of parks and known gathering spots, they lose their regular drug supplier along with their regular caseworker — and an unfamiliar supplier means an unpredictable dose. Harm reduction volunteer Tripti Choudhury raised the same concern about new Phoenix park restrictions limiting where outreach workers can legally provide care.

Arizona Already Fixed the Insurance Problem. It Never Fixed the Capacity Problem.

This is not the first time Arizona has had the tools to do better and still lagged. In January 2014, Arizona was among the earliest states to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, extending coverage — including substance use disorder treatment — to low-income adults who had never qualified before. On paper, that was supposed to be the fix: insurance access had been the wall between people and methadone clinics, therapy, and medication for opioid use disorder. AHCCCS, Arizona’s Medicaid program, now covers detox, residential treatment, counseling, and medications like buprenorphine and methadone for more than 800,000 adults added through expansion. The coverage gap closed. But covering a treatment on paper and being able to walk into a clinic and start it the same week turned out to be two different problems, and Arizona only ever solved the first one.

Twelve years later, Dr. Evans told KJZZ the barrier isn’t whether treatment is covered — it’s whether it exists to walk into. Opioid treatment programs, the clinics licensed to dispense methadone, have closed in parts of the state for lack of funding. Getting approved for coverage still often means clearing prior authorization — insurance paperwork that has to be approved before a claim is honored — before a prescription goes through, in a crisis where a delay of days can be the difference between someone starting buprenorphine and someone using alone. That matters because the medications work: Evans cites research showing methadone reduces overdose risk by roughly 60% and buprenorphine by more than 40%. Arlene Mahoney, harm reduction director at Southwest Recovery Alliance, is doing the work the treatment system isn’t keeping pace with — one reason Arizona’s coverage win from 2014 hasn’t translated into an overdose curve that looks like the rest of the country’s in 2026.

July Is Not a Neutral Month Here

None of that is theoretical for the next eight weeks. Maricopa County public health officials confirmed to KJZZ on July 2 that July is, reliably, the county’s deadliest month for overdose deaths — fatality rates run more than double January’s — drawing on the same case-level fatality data the county publishes on its own overdose dashboard. July 2023, the hottest summer on record in Phoenix, was the deadliest fatal-overdose month the county has on file. Last year, 55% of the county’s heat-related deaths involved substance use — and stimulants, mainly methamphetamine, were involved in 8 of those 10 deaths.

Here is the plain-language version of why: methamphetamine raises your heart rate, makes it harder for your body to regulate its own temperature (a function doctors call thermoregulation), and increases dehydration — three things that turn a 115-degree Phoenix afternoon from dangerous into lethal. “They make us more dehydrated, it’s harder to regulate your temperature, it increases your heart rate,” Ariella Dale, Maricopa County’s chief science officer, told KJZZ, describing what stimulants do to the body in extreme heat. Her message isn’t abstract risk communication — it’s aimed at exactly the person reading this. “We’re just trying to share with our public to consider, when they’re using these substances, that they have naloxone on-hand,” she said.

Her message isn’t abstract risk communication — it’s aimed at exactly the person reading this.

If you’re using in Maricopa County this month, the danger isn’t only the supply — it’s the heat stacking on top of it, and neither one waits for you to feel ready. Test in the shade if you can, use around someone else, and don’t assume the batch you had last week is the batch you have tonight.

There is one piece of this that hasn’t gotten worse. Even as federal regulators cut funding for fentanyl test strips and syringe access in April, naloxone funding was explicitly carved out and preserved. It is still free, still legal to carry, and still available across the Valley — NaloxoneAZ lists pickup and mail locations statewide, and Arizona’s 24-hour OAR line (1-888-688-4222) will talk a family member or a person in withdrawal through what to do next, free and confidential, tonight, no referral required.

The country’s overdose numbers are the best they’ve been in a generation because enough people decided naloxone should be everywhere, treatment should be reachable, and a less lethal supply was worth fighting for. Arizona is proof that a national win doesn’t arrive here on its own — it has to be built here, specifically, by people willing to hand a stranger a second dose of naloxone even when she’s already holding one. Harmon does that on a street corner in downtown Phoenix most days this month. The rest of the state has about eight weeks to catch up to him.