As the national opioid crisis rages on, hard-hit New England is offering a glimmer of hope.
Several states, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are on pace to record fewer overdose deaths in 2017, compared with the year before.
This follows years of fast-rising death tolls in the region, which has long been a hot spot for fatal overdoses. State officials say their efforts, ranging from widespread distribution of an overdose-rescue drug to expanded treatment access, are starting to bear fruit.
“It’s a ray of hope,” Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s Democratic governor, said this month, while announcing a 9% decline in accidental-overdose deaths through the first eight months of 2017. She was cautious about the numbers, which declined to 208 from 227, adding “we’re not out of the woods yet.”
In Massachusetts, authorities estimated a 10% decline in opioid-related deaths through September, compared with the same period last year. New Hampshire’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has projected a slight decrease, and preliminary figures in Vermont indicate that state could also trend lower.
Any sign of improvement remains tenuous, and the numbers—including an estimated 1,470 opioid-linked deaths in Massachusetts alone through the end of September—remain alarmingly high.
Declining fatalities also don’t mean the addiction crisis has abated. Massachusetts had found, for example, that overdoses there are increasingly survivable, which the state chalks up to widespread use of the overdose-reversal drug naloxone.
At the same time, policy makers are fighting a crisis that can evolve quickly as new, synthetic opioids hit the street. Some pockets of the country are getting hit especially hard by carfentanil, which is up to 100 times as potent as fentanyl, challenging efforts to halt a rising tide of deaths.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where drug deaths are also trending higher in 2017, has seen at least 128 carfentanil-linked fatalities this year, up from 56 last year, according to the medical examiner’s office.
“The county has responded well, but the speed with which the crisis changes has been challenging,” said Thomas Gilson, the county medical examiner.
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SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, Jon Kamp
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