ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Drug overdose deaths have fallen dramatically in the United States. New federal data show young people under the age of 35 are seeing some of the biggest improvements. NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann has been tracking this promising shift in America's overdose crisis. Hi, Brian.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Let's begin by looking back at how fentanyl affected young people and their families. Why was this drug epidemic different?
MANN: Well, first, it was just starkly, and is still starkly, more deadly. It reached also into every corner of society. Covering this crisis over the last five years, I've met so many people devastated by fentanyl. One of the young people I spent time with was Ryan Barnett, a guy in his 20s in Oklahoma, who is now in recovery from fentanyl. Sitting at his kitchen table in 2023, he told me he feels lucky to be alive.
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RYAN BARNETT: I did take a big chunk of my life and threw it in the trash. You know, you lose your best friends in this whole thing. If they're alive, they're in prison, for the most part.
MANN: And I've heard this over and over, Ari. Fentanyl is so lethal it forced families to think differently about drugs. You know, drug experimentation has been part of American culture for decades - risky but, in the past, usually not deadly. But after drug dealers started mixing fentanyl into cocaine and into fake prescription pills and other drugs, young people were just incredibly vulnerable. Over the last decade alone, more than 230,000 people in the U.S. under the age of 35 have died from drug overdoses.
SHAPIRO: Which makes this reversal so dramatic. How big is the shift?
MANN: Yeah, this really is the first moment of hope for many families since fentanyl hit. The deaths just seemed unstoppable. But in 2023, the number of deaths among teens and 20-somethings finally started edging down. And then last year, they really plunged, with some young people seeing a 47% decline in deaths. Ed Ternan is co-founder of a fentanyl awareness group called Song for Charlie. In 2020, his own son, a college student, was killed by the drug. Here's what he had to say.
ED TERNAN: I think we are making progress. Mortality among, say, college-age people, 20 to 24, has gone down faster than the rest of the population.
MANN: Deaths are also declining among teens. Although slower, there is significant progress there too. In all, we're seeing about 15,000 fewer deaths per year among people under the age of 35. That's last year compared with the peak of the crisis.
SHAPIRO: And do researchers think fentanyl deaths will keep coming down?
MANN: This part's really cool. There are some signs that this trend could be solid and could push forward. Nabarun Dasgupta is an addiction policy researcher at the University of North Carolina. He's been looking at real-time overdose reports collected in just the last few months in cities and rural counties around the U.S. He found that drug deaths for young people appear to still be dropping.
NABARUN DASGUPTA: From these fast-reporting jurisdictions, I see the trend continuing and accentuating.
MANN: So we've now seen two straight years of improvement in drug deaths for young people. Now we're at the lowest level since 2013.
SHAPIRO: Big positive shifts like this don't usually happen with street drugs. Do drug policy experts know what is helping young people survive?
MANN: Yeah, some families and activists I've been talking to believe teens and 20-somethings are finally getting the message that drug experimentation is just a lot riskier now. There's also a lot more Narcan, also known as naloxone, being distributed. That's the medication that reverses fentanyl overdoses. And there's also just less fentanyl getting into American communities now. The supply has been disrupted, and that could mean fewer kids exposed.
SHAPIRO: These improvements came during the last two years of the Biden administration, and now President Trump is in office. Is the national response to fentanyl changing?
MANN: Yeah, the Biden team invested a massive amount of federal money in the fentanyl fight. The Republican budget passed by the House with President Trump's support would cut billions of dollars from those programs. The Congressional Budget Office says a lot of low-income Americans will likely lose insurance coverage that often goes for addiction care. The Health and Human Services Department sent a statement to NPR saying the goal is to streamline resources and eliminate redundancies. But a lot of family members, doctors and researchers I talked to are worried that important programs could be cut and this dramatic recovery for people under 35 could stall.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann. Thank you.
MANN: Thank you, Ari. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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