FROM EXPERTS AND MEDIA YOU TRUST, MORE OPIOID CRISIS “GOOD NEWS” TO HIDE A WORSENING CRISIS
With fewer of the increasing numbers of opioid overdoses resulting in deaths due to emergency naloxone reversals – leaders, experts and media are restoring false confidence with soothing lies
by Clark Miller
Published January 23, 2026
More good news about the opioid crisis, this time from New Hampshire.
After nearly a decade of grim statistics, New Hampshire’s getting some very good news in the fight against opioid death and addiction.
The latest data show opioid deaths and overdoses have dropped dramatically, with overdose deaths and emergency responses falling to their lowest levels in a decade in the state’s two largest cities.
No one died from opioid-related overdoses in Nashua last month, and Manchester saw three overdose deaths, continuing a trend that health officials say could mark a genuine shift in the long-running epidemic.
“October suspected opioid ODs were well below recent averages and continue to trend in a very encouraging direction,” said Chris Stawasz, Northeast regional director of government affairs for Global Medical Response, Inc.
Stawasz, who began tracking opioid overdose statistics in Manchester and Nashua for a decade, said 2025 is shaping up to be the best year yet in the fight against opioids. AMR medics responded to just 35 suspected opioid overdoses in the two cities in October — 17 in Manchester and 18 in Nashua.
“The combined (two) city total of 35 was the lowest total number of suspected opioid ODs in one month since AMR began tracking them 10 years ago,” Stawasz said. “The 17 suspected opioid ODs in Manchester were by far the lowest one-month total since AMR began tracking them 10 years ago.”
[emphasis added]
THAT IS “GOOD NEWS” !
It is, isn’t it?
It would have to be, right?
Not just for reduction of opioid overdoses and fatal overdoses, but for “addiction” itself, it says, right in the article.
The expert and writer make it clear, don’t they, that when they refer to opioid “overdoses”, as opposed to “opioid overdose deaths”, they are referring to the number of opioid overdoses that were recorded when emergency responders were called and involved, that’s where they got their data, their numbers – from the incidents logged by emergency medical responders and that become part of a searchable, available record. That’s clear.
Oh … wait … that’s a problem, isn’t it? A really big problem that we’ve seen before.
Because what we know, what is established (and here, for example), is that over past years desperate, dramatically successful campaigns across the U.S. have placed potentially fatal overdose reversing naloxone into the hands of laypersons and others proximate to overdosers – where every second counts and naloxone saves have surged. And we know that along with that dramatic shift from emergency responders reversing potentially fatal ODs to increasingly community members, fewer and fewer potentially fatal opioid ODs are being formally reported or end up in the type of searchable databases that can be accessed for reports or news articles. AND, of course, that establishes that opioid overdoses (= high-risk opioid use = gold standard treatment failure) are being grossly undercounted.
Using those known underestimates of high-risk use and potentially fatal overdoses as evidence for gains against the opioid crisis, let alone against “addiction,” is what we would have to characterize most generously as the abject failure of America’s expert and media classes, more realistically as the distortions and mystifications necessary for them to attempt to escape culpability.
None of this is new or unknown for New Hampshire – the role of naloxone campaigns and not other factors in reduced opioid deaths; the shift to unreported reversal of potentially fatal overdoses; the lethal failure of expert gold standard treatments – instead was available from news reports appearing in 2024 and January of 2025 and from other sources, described in this post from March, 2025.
At the very end of the NH JOURNAL piece celebrating the “very good news” of gains in the “fight against opioids” that is moving in “a very encouraging direction” and “a genuine shift” are these two paragraphs.
Experts say one major factor behind falling death rates is widespread access to Narcan, the overdose-reversing medication. Narcan is available without a prescription at most New Hampshire pharmacies and distributed at no cost through public health programs and harm-reduction agencies.
“With Narcan now widely available, it is likely that some opioid overdoses are now occurring without 911 intervention, and are not being reported due to rapid reversal,” Stawasz said.
[emphasis added]
That is in conveyed meaning, if not intent, a lethal lie, disregarding evidence establishing that across many diverse states and locales including New Hampshire, consistently, it is entirely naloxone responsible for recent, dramatic drops in opioid overdose deaths and that consistently, increasing high-risk use and potentially fatal overdoses are being missed, unseen, hidden.
The suggestion in the news piece that the data represent “lives being changed and saved” is not a lie, instead lethal understatement.
Lives are being saved by desperate, emergency naloxone campaigns, necessary as the sole factor reducing opioid deaths, as harm reduction against the established lethality of expert gold standard treatments.
But saved with hidden costs in the new opioid crisis, in which lives are being changed with increasing prevalence, changed forever by the cognitive damages and associated impairments and injuries from serial naloxone reversals of overdoses with hypoxia-related brain damage that render high-risk users less and less able to engage in therapies and changes that could otherwise actually free them from compulsive opioid use.
Those are the changes the medical model, expert gold standard treatments, and media cowardice have trapped them in.
