Justin Carlisle is part of a trend that has stunned drug addiction experts.

I was real young, man. I was 13 or 14 when I first tried and cocaine, crack cocaine for the first time.

He's been using drugs for a decade in the rough neighborhood of Kensington, Philadelphia.

From crack, Carlisle moved on to the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl.

Yeah, I've had three overdoses. Two of the times, I was definitely Narcan.

Narcan is the medication that reverses opioid overdoses. It's also called naloxone. Without it,

Carlisle says he wouldn't be alive today. And his survival makes him part of this remarkable shift. After years when drug deaths among

young Americans kept spiraling higher and higher, far more are now surviving. What we're seeing is a

massive reduction in overdose risk among Gen Z in particular. Overall, drug deaths in the United States are declining fast,

and the latest federal data show young people are seeing the biggest improvements.

Ages 20 to 29 lowered their risk by 47 percent, cut it right in half.

People in that age group are usually among the most vulnerable to overdoses.

Today, they have the lowest rate of drug deaths in more

than a decade. Parents, like John Epstein, have been waiting for a moment of hope like this one.

What has happened with the 29-year-olds? They beat fentanyl. In 2020, his 18-year-old son, Cal,

died from fentanyl. He was one of 28,000 people under the age of 35 to die

from drugs that year. And the numbers kept climbing until last year, when fatal overdoses

suddenly dropped by 40%. We continue to look at the data and we're super heartened to finally

see the teens dropping.

Consider this. Fentinal deaths among young people are plummeting at an unprecedented rate.

The question now is how to keep that trend going.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

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