MASSACHUSETTS – MEDIA SPIN SIGNS OF WORSENING OPIOID CRISIS AS TREATMENT GAINS WHILE NARCAN’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED
Same perpetually repeated, lethally distorted media spin, different helpful fabricators
by Clark Miller
Published July 19, 2024
It’s the same desperately fictional story we’ve seen over and over again, with the same predictably lethal outcomes. Nationwide and in Massachusetts intense, successful campaigns to distribute, train on, and increase use of the opioid emergency overdose lethality-reversing drug naloxone (Narcan), the outcomes in deaths prevented directly observed, recorded, and reported, the numbers far larger, sometimes by orders of magnitude, than temporally correlated downturns, moderations, in annual incidence of lethal overdose, as predicted.
With the inescapable facts that can only add up to one thing, those facts including –
– That each of the increasing instances of an emergency reversal of an otherwise lethal opioid overdose (each a welcome and important life-saving act) is a direct indication and measure of and instance of high-risk opioid use, reduction of high-risk opioid use the only means by which gains can be made against the epidemic
– Small reductions in opioid OD deaths corresponding to the increased Narcan saves
– Number of reported saves much larger than numerical decrease in OD deaths
– No indication of non-confounded, more direct measures of high-risk opioid use (i.e. measures of severity of the opioid crisis) decreasing, such as incidence of opioid injection-related infectious disease (a measure of high-risk opioid use) or of total (lethal and non-lethal) overdoses, also a valid, non-confounded measure of severity of the crisis.

In Massachusetts, in other locales consistently, nationwide, those intractable facts can only mean one thing – that while the lethal crisis worsens year-by-year, campaigns increasing Narcan use and lethal OD reversals are masking, hiding increasing prevalence of high-risk opioid use, while drug combinations and increasingly potent synthetics predict increasing defeat of reliable naloxone revival, those predictable outcomes obscured by useful distortions of compliant media.
Let’s take a look.
Massachusetts recorded a significant drop in opioid-related overdose deaths in 2023, forging a potential turning point after the state’s fatality count hit a record high the previous year.
State officials say there were 2,125 confirmed and estimated opioid-related overdose deaths last year, or 30.2 per 100,000 residents. That marks a 10% decline compared to 2022, when the epidemic claimed the lives of 2,357 Bay Staters, at a rate of 33.5 per 100,000. . . .
Goldstein attributed the declining fatality rate in 2023 to the state’s distribution of naloxone, a medication that reverses overdoses, as well as syringe service programs, an overdose prevention hotline, and a drug-checking program that allows officials to understand the lethality of the drug supply here.
“We have one of the best naloxone distribution programs in the country, and we have naloxone everywhere in every community, so that people can use it,” Goldstein said. “We have really pioneered the use of syringe service programs in this state, and to use a harm reduction lens in everything that is being done.”
DPH said it has distributed more than 196,500 naloxone kits, with each kit containing two doses, since 2023. The effort has led to at least 10,206 overdose reversals, officials said.
Let’s keep those dramatic numbers and claims in mind –
Goldstein attributed the declining fatality rate in 2023 to the state’s distribution of naloxone, a medication that reverses overdoses, . . .
“We have one of the best naloxone distribution programs in the country, and we have naloxone everywhere in every community, so that people can use it,” Goldstein said. . . .
DPH said it has distributed more than 196,500 naloxone kits, with each kit containing two doses, since 2023. The effort has led to at least 10,206 overdose reversals, officials said.
This sounds familiar – like the intensive, successful naloxone campaigns in Utah, in Florida and Connecticut we’ve discussed in prior posts.
From that news report, again –
Massachusetts recorded a significant drop in opioid-related overdose deaths in 2023, forging a potential turning point after the state’s fatality count hit a record high the previous year.
“forging a potential turning point”
Let’s think about that, what that can possibly mean apart from the clear intent to instill lethally false beliefs in readers that progress is being made in reducing the inner distress and behaviors leading vulnerable individuals in Massachusetts to compulsively engage in high-risk opioid use with risk of death in the opioid epidemic.
Because that claim of progress of course, clearly, is not true. The desperate, intensive campaigns to distribute Narcan for emergency reversals does nothing to address those psychosocial and other factors driving high-risk use, instead are necessary precisely because of and represent the need to slow the rate of those overdoses resulting in deaths.
At least for now, providing a false sense of security and more importantly the lie that American expert class treatments are having some beneficial effect as more and more is applied to diseased brains, the lie to cover the established fact that those gold standard cures instead are fueling the lethal crisis.
What potential turning point is that, being forged?
That false sense of security and health system competence is a helpful but lethal illusion at least for now, until naloxone no longer can keep up with the intractably evolving moving target of potentially lethal opioid drugs and drug combinations.
The signs are everywhere, increasingly in news reports, and the potentially deadly combinations defeating Narcan are nothing new.
Deadly opioid abused drug combinations have been around for decades, often prescribed by doctors together.
Our desperate user’s free or cheap “subs”, the controlled, addictive opioid Suboxone in unlimited supply on the street for a few dollars or provided by phone hook-up with his licensed prescriber – mixed with the insurance-covered benzodiazepines provided by the same or another medical prescriber, a high-risk, naloxone-defeating combo known for decades – gives him what he needs. And defeats Narcan, contributing increasingly to overdose deaths combined with opioids.
Known for decades, that buprenorphine, America’s gold standard cure for compulsive opioid use, instead functions as currency on the street for fentanyl and any new synthetic or drug combination that will emerge.
In Massachusetts, benzos reportedly are being found in 25 percent of opioid overdose deaths.

More celebration of the signs of a worsening epidemic,
from the Boston Globe and one of America’s top addiction experts –
Leo Beletsky, director of Northeastern University’s Action Lab at the Center for Health Policy and Law, said the apparent decrease is “unequivocally good news” after watching overdoses climb for years. . . .
“There’s been substantial progress, so that could certainly be the case, that things are finally yielding or bearing fruit…. There’s also trends in the drug supply that we could be seeing reflected in overdose numbers,” Beletsky said. He added that with increased awareness, the “fentanyl-fueled surge in overdoses is leveling off.”
But it’s not good news, let alone “unequivocally good news”, instead the lethal opposite of good news.
It’s tedious, isn’t it? Having to persistently call out the obvious, the benighted, lethal distortions?
We have no evidence from the CDC report or elsewhere to suggest that overdoses – due to high-risk use of opioids – have decreased, only that there was a small decrease in those ODs that resulted in deaths, fully accounted for by desperate, dramatic increases in distribution and use of emergency overdose-reversing naloxone, those surges evidence of continuing increases in high-risk opioid use.

More from the helpfully celebratory media accounts –

When looking at geographic statistics, the rural areas of Massachusetts continue to have the highest opioid-related overdose fatalities. According to the DPH, the death rate in these areas is recorded to be 35.6 per 100,000 residents.
Overdose deaths also trended lower in Massachusetts than they did nationwide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nationwide, overdose deaths were down 3% in 2023 compared to 2022, versus the 10% drop in Massachusetts.
That all makes sense, the Massachusetts naloxone campaign described as one of the best in the country and at the same time focused on areas of most dense high-risk use, “could be even more effective if it were available in more places”. In contrast, the expert gold standard “treatments” promised to reduce severity of the persistently worsening crisis specifically by reducing high-risk opioid use are established as being essentially unlimited in locational availability and accessibility.
To the extent that the necessarily protective, useful distortions and fabrications messaged by America’s medical/media collusion are successful, believed, the celebrated “potential turning point” portends an increasingly fragile naloxone house of cards, predictable surges of illness and death.