Preliminary data suggests fatal fentanyl overdoses may have peaked in Washington state. But it’s not all good news.
At the end of 2023, the state’s quarterly death toll, which had increased nearly every quarter since 2019, was down 9%. While synthetic opioid deaths are still rising in some areas of the state, King County’s death rate has been declining since July 2023. On average, four people died every day from fentanyl overdose.
Caleb Banta Green, a research professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said the change appears to be largely due to the fact that so many fentanyl users in the Seattle area have already died.
“There’s only a limited number of people using drugs, and when the lethality of a drug is this high, eventually it starts to disappear on its own, like a forest fire, in a really frightening way,” Banta Green said. he said. . “So we’re literally burning out the fuel. The scary thing in this case is that the fuel is humans.”
Vantagreen said a steep curve was also observed on the East Coast, where fentanyl had previously taken hold.
“We hope that the decline continues, but the decline in the future will not be because people are dying, but because people will have access to some really great life-saving interventions that we are making great strides towards more broadly. “I hope that’s why it’s available,” he said.
This includes alternative drugs such as buprenorphine and methadone, which reduce the amount of opioids taken and lower the user’s risk of fatal overdose.
