Drug deaths are finally falling—but the cause may be far outside of U.S. policy makers’ control.
For two decades, the United States and Canada have struggled with a drug epidemic. From 2003 to 2022, annual overdose deaths in the United States rose from less than 26,000 to nearly 108,000—becoming the leading nonmedical cause of death, surpassing car accidents and gun violence combined. In Canada, overdose deaths increased almost tenfold in the same period. In both countries, the surge in deaths was supercharged by “synthetic” opioids such as fentanyl, the ultra-potent, lab-made narcotic that has come to dominate the supply of hard drugs.
Then, sometime in 2023, something miraculous happened: Death rates started dropping. In Canada, opioid-overdose deaths declined 17 percent in 2024, then continued falling sharply in the first six months of 2025 (the most recent months for which data are available). In America, preliminary data indicate that total drug deaths fell from their peak of just shy of 113,000 in the year ending August 2023 to about 73,000 in the year ending August 2025.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Atlantic (paywall)
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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