Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.1 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2025
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
Today we bring you a reporter's notebook from NPR's national addiction correspondent Brian Mann. He tells host Scott Detrow what it's been like to cover America's addiction crisis and explains the significance of the recent decline in opioid deaths.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Every month, NPR reporter Brian Mann checks a grim statistic, the federal tally of overdose deaths across the country. |
| 0:08.1 | For years, that number only went up, but then toward the end of 2023... |
| 0:14.0 | Suddenly, the data coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed this drop. |
| 0:19.9 | Maybe it was a fluke, but the next month, same thing. |
| 0:23.4 | One month, two months in a row at drop, three months. |
| 0:26.8 | Brian also started hearing the same thing from sources on the street. |
| 0:30.5 | Like this man, Kevin Donaldson, who was using fentanyl and xylazine in Burlington, Vermont. |
| 0:35.1 | For a while, they were hearing about it every other day, but when it was last overdose, |
| 0:39.1 | we heard about a couple weeks still maybe, that's pretty far and few between. |
| 0:43.4 | What I was hearing from people using drugs on the street, talking to frontline harm reduction, |
| 0:48.6 | people listening to people in Washington looking at this, they were saying, this feels different. The carnage |
| 0:55.1 | feels like it's easing. Suddenly, there was a shift. Across the country, the number of overdose |
| 1:02.1 | deaths has continued to drop to this day. This is a science fiction level event, like never before |
| 1:08.3 | in the history of America's drug crisis. And this goes even back |
| 1:11.8 | before the pain pill crisis of the 90s, go back to heroin, go back to crack cocaine. We've |
| 1:16.7 | never solved a drug epidemic in the way that these numbers suggest. The best interventions, |
| 1:23.7 | with everybody throwing everything at the problem, sometimes can ease the problem by 8, 9%. |
| 1:28.8 | We're now seeing states where drug deaths are dropping 50% in a single year. 30%, 40% is now common. That level of decline, so many lives being saved. |
| 1:41.9 | Consider this. The recent decline in overdose deaths is an unprecedented public health victory, one that shocked even experts in the field. |
| 1:50.8 | Today, for our weekly reporter's notebook series, we're going to unravel the mystery of this rapid reversal with Brian Mann and Pierre's addiction correspondent. |
| 1:59.3 | From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong. |
| 2:09.8 | Since Donald Trump took office in January, a lot has happened. The White House Budget Office |
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