FLORIDA: PRESENCE OF MEDICAL OPIOID CRISIS CURES IN FATAL OVERDOSES PREDICTABLY INCREASES
Another rip in the Matrix reveals the longstanding, hidden role of expert, gold standard cures methadone and buprenorphine driving high-risk use and deaths
by Clark Miller
Published December 19, 2025
The trends are reported in a news piece from the USA TODAY NETWORK.
– Florida saw a dramatic 14% drop in drug overdose deaths in 2024, reaching pre-pandemic levels.
– Deaths from fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine all saw significant decreases in the state.
– Despite the overall drop, data shows an increase in deaths involving buprenorphine and methadone, which are used to treat opioid addiction.
[emphasis added]
There are no surprises here. Methadone and buprenorphine have been established for decades as integral in street economies of illicit opioid and other drug use.
Consistently and predictably, increased provision of methadone is associated with higher incidence of opioid-related fatal overdose.
Buprenorphine, one of the most widely available drugs in “street” economies, is commonly used as currency for fentanyl and serves to enable illicit opioid use.
Florida has been busy increasing the medical dispensing of those opioids established as fueling the crisis.
That’s covered in previous posts here at A Critical Discourse here and here and here and here.
See also this post on Florida’s response to the crisis, illustrating that, as in other locales consistently, it’s naloxone entirely accounting for reductions in fatal opioid overdoses, serving as emergency harm reduction against expert gold standard treatments.
There are no surprises here.
It’s not at all a surprise that constructed “experts” in compliant media reports would portray recent drops in fatal opioid overdoses (established as tied entirely in Florida as elsewhere to desperate emergency naloxone campaigns required to moderate the lethal effects of gold standard treatments, see posts linked to above) as somehow representing gains against a worsening crisis.
After years of grim milestones, Florida’s drug crisis finally bent in the right direction in 2024, with overdose deaths dropping 14% – a downturn so dramatic longtime forensic experts say they’ve never seen anything like it.
Nor is it a surprise that “experts” responsible for opioid crisis “treatment” approaches over past decades while high-risk use, overdose, and deaths have mounted – until and only when countered by successful emergency naloxone campaigns – would pathologically, desperately portray the recent drops as somehow benefitting from the gold standard treatments that have been increasingly supplied and dispensed, with deaths mounting, over decades of the worsening crisis.
Without providing a shred of evidence for those fabricated, alternative explanations. That’s because there is no evidence to support them.
Naloxone campaigns? The evidence is as direct and incontrovertible as is possible – each use to reverse a potentially fatal opioid OD is a life saved, a reduction in the yearly tally of deaths, and even when serial saves for high-risk users are factored in, the saves – consistently in all locations examined – more than account for all reductions in OD deaths.
While the Sunshine State’s decline in overdose deaths is consistent with trends nationwide, experts can’t pinpoint one specific reason for the change. Widespread availability of naloxone, which rapidly reverses opioid overdoses; changes in the drug supply; drug-using preferences and more access to recovery options could all be playing a role in keeping more Floridians alive.
Yes, this is tedious, I know. And it needs to be faced.
Last year, national trends showed more people who use drugs turned to smoking instead of injecting. When injecting, the effects of the drug enter the bloodstream and get to the brain in a few seconds. A person smokes by inhaling vapors released from a drug heated by indirect heat, like from a lighter, in a glass pipe.
In fact, smoking is a faster route of administration than injecting.
Check it.
Goldberger said other hypotheses for the steep drop in overdose deaths are the widespread use of naloxone and the prevalence of fentanyl in the drug supply is no longer increasing. “People who are using fentanyl have been using fentanyl now for several years and have developed an increased tolerance to it, and therefore less likely to overdose,” he said.
That’s a transparent lie. That naloxone campaigns are accounting for the drops in fatal ODs is not a hypothesis; it is established, incontrovertibly.
Opioid overdoses are increasing, including those due to fentanyl, and fatal opioid overdoses (that would be different than overdoses, wouldn’t it?) are decreasing due to naloxone campaigns.
No surprises, including that an absurdly nonsensical expert rationalization would be offered to attempt to hide the meaning of increasing detection of medical gold standard cures methadone and buprenorphine in fatal opioid overdose lab work.
In the 2024 data, the only drugs that saw an increase in occurrence in overdose deaths were buprenorphine and methadone. Buprenorphine, also known as suboxone, and methadone are both prescription drugs used to treat opioid use disorder. Marino said those two medicines being detected in autopsy findings isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“It’s like saying we have a big problem with heart attack deaths, and then once we started dealing with those better we were detecting more aspirin in people who died,” Marino said. “The fact that these were listed as overdose deaths means that something wasn’t working right, but having those two medicines detected means more people are having access to them, and those aren’t necessarily causing the overdoses or the deaths.”
Yeaaahhh … about that analogy.
There is one way, only one way, that substitute opioid medications can reduce fatal overdoses, and that is by preventing the types of high-risk opioid use that carry a high risk of fatal OD. Lacking that effect, there is no gain.
We know that while provision of those cures has been increasing, high-risk opioid use has been increasing, know that by a varietey of valid measures.
We know that because the desperate need for dramatic, intensive, moderating naloxone campaigns has arisen preciesely as necessary response to continuously mounting high-risk use and overdose.
We know that methadone has always been abused with other opioids and other drugs added.
We know that buprenorphine, “bupe”, “subs”, has functioned for decades as the common street currency for fentanyl and other illicit opioids.
And we know that high-risk, illicit opioid use occurs along with use of bupe, including with the “game-changing”, fail-safe, abuse- and diversion-proof, injectable form, Sublocade.
The presence of American medicine’s gold standard opioid cures in fatal OD toxicology reports simply further illustrates their lethal failure.
But no matter, the lies are working (although someone might want to check in with Philadelphia residents).
A recent Gallup poll shows the percentage of Americans who believe the U.S. has made progress in dealing with the problem of illegal drugs has increased to 45%, the highest Gallup has recorded since 2000.
The lies are absolutely necessary, for protection, and will continue to be, at any cost.
Until somehow exposed and corrected.
