Why have North American overdose deaths dropped so sharply?
For 15 years, fentanyl deaths in America kept climbing higher, but then, seemingly out of nowhere, they plummeted. The drop started sometime in the middle of 2023. And by the end of 2024, deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses had dropped by more than a third. But researchers weren’t entirely sure why it happened. There wasn’t some big medical breakthrough or a national push to build more rehab clinics. But recently, a group of researchers published a paper about what they think happened. In this episode, Katty Kay speaks with Dr. Keith Humphreys, who was one of the experts behind that paper. His explanation for what happened raises some tricky questions about what actually stopped these fatal overdoses, and whether things will likely stay that way.
