NPR BREAKING NEWS: PERSISTENTLY MOUNTING HIGH RISK OPIOID USE AND OVERDOSE ARE ACTUALLY “SUSTAINABLE”, A “VERY EXCITING” AND “CLEAR PUBLIC HEALTH IMPROVEMENT”
Due to intense, community-level provision and training campaigns that get reversal kits to laypersons, sudden deaths have suddenly, dramatically dropped despite increases in risk and need for emergency saves
by Clark Miller
Published March 21, 2025
As reported by NPR’s top food addiction writer Brian Mann, after years of increase in deaths due to heart disease in America, dramatic and widespread drops in sudden deaths due to cardiac events have been recorded for every state according to most recent CDC data.
That follows intensive, widespread, successful efforts to miniaturize automated external defibrillator devices (AEDs) and provide them, with training, to the general populace, targeting areas of highest risk for sudden cardiac events.
Per reports from state and community groups involved in the intensive efforts to “flood” communities with AEDs, now more than 60 percent of Americans age 13 and older carry each day with them an AED unit in a fanny pack or small shoulder bag.
Reports gathered from those groups show that “saves” – revival of individuals in their homes, at work, in other public places – have prevented hundreds of thousands of sudden cardiac events from resulting in deaths, due to the saving of minutes and seconds by having trained bystanders use the devices at the scene, with faster response than emergency medical services (EMS) arrival. Those saves account for more than all of the decreases recently recorded for deaths due to cardiovascular disease.
Commenting on the remarkable, large declines in incidence of sudden cardiac deaths directly observed and predictably following the intensive, successful AED campaigns and associated use of AED units to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past year – obesity, nutrition, and health habits data expert Nabarun Dasgupta notes that “”It has been a complete shock to see the numbers declining in the way they have been.”
Despite the sudden spike in emergency saves tied to distribution and use of AEDs and decreasing incidence of sudden deaths, there have been no decreases in prevalence of cardiovascular disease or associated risk factors including obesity, hypertension, and inactivity, in fact all those measures are increasing.
Notes U.S. top health expert and head of the American Heart Association Dr. Nora Volkow, “It’s very, very exciting to see”.
NPR reporter Mann talked to “Vadim” and his partner “Elena” (names changed) in a McDonalds restaurant in the Kensington district of Philadelphia. The couple, in their 30s, experience morbid obesity, are smokers, and are diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. They note that they have been “defibbed” with AEDs multiple times by friends, a source of great gratitude, assurance and confidence for them. The repeated, extra chances on life after each episode and revival, despite likely cumulative effects due to brain oxygen deprivation, have constituted spiritual experiences, leading them into recovery, now choosing gluten-free burgers and fries and starting daily vaping of nicotine in addition to the 10 to 20 traditional cigarettes they smoke daily, on the understanding from experts that vaping will cause them to stop use of the cigarettes.
In the NPR piece, Mann reports that the story of Vadim and Elena strikes him as a touching love story of sorts, resonating for him with Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice”. Elena reflects as they order more food and sodas, that “I have hope,” Elena said. “I have to, you know?”
The NPR piece notes that some observers and advocates for prevention and public health approaches to underlying risk factors and disease have suggested that the extensive AED campaigns that have, in effect, the average American functioning each day as an emergency responder, are valuable and important in saving lives, also suggesting that reversing trends in sudden cardiac deaths in effect hides the severity of persistent increases in Americans’ high-risk behaviors that are driving cardiovascular disease and its increasing incidence, which represents a failure of approaches and public healthcare funding of public health organizations and institutions like Volkow’s.
Top expert Dr. Volkow adds again, “It’s very, very exciting to see that it’s dramatically decreasing”.
Okay.
Okay, okay, OKAY !!
I’ll stop.
That of course was all a lie, a fiction. All of that would be absurd, wouldn’t it?
Those responses and clueless, malignant non-responses to the obvious – that while saving lives is always valuable and important, hiding the persistent worsening of a lethal epidemic by distraction and pretending that the underlying causes are a mystery is a sham to hide public health and other institutional failures.
Worse, portraying the harm-reducing emergency revivals desperately required due to lethal failure of American Medicine and Public Health approaches as “exciting” and “clear public health improvement”, goes beyond absurd. It’s pathological. Lethal.
And? That portrayal of fictional AED campaigns – close to what in reality is happening with naloxone campaigns in the opioid crisis – and incidence of cardiovascular disease is strictly and accurately analogous to America’s opioid crisis and medical/media collusion generation of lies and deceptions to hide its lethal failure. That’s all established here and here.
The real, not satirical, NPR news piece screams out for satire, for derision. What was not a lie is that cardiovascular disease, along with diabetes, are increasing in the U.S. with known risk factors, especially obesity, an outcome of compulsive use of food.
Here’s what the NPR piece actually conveys.
The deadliest phase of the street fentanyl crisis appears to have ended, as drug deaths continue to drop at an unprecedented pace. For the first time, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have now seen at least some recovery.
A new analysis of U.S. overdose data conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also found that the decline in deaths began much earlier than once understood, suggesting improvements may be sustainable
“This is not a blip. We are on track to return to levels of [fatal] overdose before fentanyl emerged,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, lead researcher on the project, which examined overdose records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dasgupta’s team found deaths linked to fentanyl and other street drugs have already plunged in many states to levels not seen since 2020. That’s when the spread of fentanyl and the COVID pandemic dealt a one-two punch, triggering a catastrophic surge of fatal overdoses.
“After all this time looking at overdose deaths, this is what we’ve been hoping for,” Dasgupta said. “It has been a complete shock to see the numbers declining in the way they have been.”
[emphasis added]
The devil is in the details, in this case between brackets – [fatal].
It turns out, established by extensive, consistent evidence across regions and locales, that while recent intensive, targeted, peer- and layperson-focused, successful campaigns to get naloxone into the hands of those most effectively in positions to makes saves entirely account – more than account – for any and all recent, significant drops in opioid fatal overdoses, the desperate need for such campaigns reflects and confirms persistently mounting high-risk opioid use and overdoses that are increasingly reversed in communities and not reported, masking the true extent of a worsening epidemic. And masking the lethal failure of American expert opioid crisis and substance use treatment approaches.
That’s why an editor, apparently, added [fatal] to provide some protection, deniability, against the lethal deceptions being conveyed too overtly.
In locale after locale, the evidence, rather than being a “complete shock” or a mystery, establishes those incontrovertible trends, for example in this recent post and in the list of links there to other locales.
Fewer deaths as drug users adapt and use Narcan
Drug deaths in the U.S. have now dropped from a peak of 114,000 in August 2023 to just under 87,000, according to the latest provisional data from September 2024 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ..
The Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia. City officials, nonprofit groups, churches and other organizations have attempted to reduce the amount of open street drug use, but most locals say progress has been slow. While deaths are down, people struggling with addiction are visible on most streets. …
One other factor, they said, is naloxone, also known as Narcan, which is much more widely available now. The medication is used to reverse overdoses. Elena and Vadim said they had both been “narcaned” repeatedly by friends, which might have saved their lives.
Public health experts say these factors — along with more readily available addiction treatment and a decline in the potency of street fentanyl — likely contributed to the rapid decline in fatal overdoses here and around the country. ..
The latest CDC provisional data did show five low-population Western states experiencing an uptick in drug deaths, including fentanyl, in 2024. The cumulative rise of roughly 260 fatal overdoses was clustered mostly in Nevada. But even those states are now below their peaks.
That’s right …
In hot spots like Kensington – and consistently elsewhere – there are no signs of decreases in high-risk opioid use, because high-risk use and nonfatal overdoses are persistently increasing including by reports of surges in unrecorded reversals by peers and laypersons, also by other measures.
Established as having no benefit and predicting increased risk of continued problem substance use, “addiction treatment” including MAT (MOUD) are contributing to deaths, not to the decline in fatal overdoses.
And those “Western states” still experiencing upticks in opioid overdose deaths? Turns out they are “exceptions” that prove the lethal rule – the trends entirely and predictably tied to delays in effective naloxone campaigns in concert with reckless dispensing to high-risk opioid users of the common street currency and “bridge” for persistent fentanyl and other opioid use.
Those lethal-rule-proving exceptions include Washington, Nevada, Tennessee, San Francisco, and Utah (upcoming post).
Volkow and Dasgupta said there’s growing evidence this shift is long-term and sustainable, though they agreed it’s still not clear why deaths are dropping so fast.
Indeed, Dasgupta’s more precise analysis of CDC records found many states actually saw overdose deaths begin dropping in 2021 and 2022, much earlier than previously reported. …
As more people avoid fatal overdoses, experts said there could actually be a rise in visible drug use in neighborhoods like Kensington, accompanied by a sharp increase in need for health care, housing, recovery treatment and other support. …
Addiction experts say the drop in fatal overdose deaths gives people more time and more opportunity to heal.
It is, in fact, entirely clear why rates of fatal opioid overdoses are “dropping so fast” – precisely explained by and caused by the dramatic increases in various, widespread locales consistently of use of Narcan to reverse otherwise potentially fatal ODs.
Those earlier reductions? Actually beginning as early as 2018 in Ohio, described here and attributable to … anyone? anyone? Another exception proving the lethal rule.
Unfortunately, tragically, and predictably the surge in naloxone reversals will support persistently mounting high-risk opioid use and overdose, while Narcan’s days are numbered, and without any evidence to suggest that American expert gold standard “addiction” treatments will become less lethal than over past decades of continuously worsening epidemics.
And “more time and more opportunity to heal” ?
Addiction experts say a lot of things, have been providing assurances and direction over many decades of a culture increasingly sickened by raging epidemics of problem substance use and illness, the more their cures are dispensed and provided.
From a recent post –
Reversing overdoses is not what we want. Optimally, what we want is preventing the overdose in the first place,” Appa said. “The cumulative effects of [lack of oxygen] on the brain are obviously not great.”
