CHARLESTON, W.Va. — President of the Drug Intervention Institute in Charleston Dr. Susan Margaret Murphy said the numbers recently released by the CDC showing an over 11% decline in overdose deaths in West Virginia is not an occasion to celebrate, but a cause to double down on efforts to combat the crisis.
“We can’t stop, we gotta keep moving, we have to keep moving if we want to continue to see numbers decline,” Murphy said.
The recent CDC report indicated overdose deaths dropped 10% nationwide with an approximate 11.56% decline in West Virginia between April 2023 to April of this year, sparking much positive attention across media platforms, politicians and public health officials.
Murphy says, however, that there are many factors coming into play which are making it difficult to correlate the 10% average drop in overdose deaths from last year to this year.
She said first of all, the decrease is likely a reflection of data from the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Murphy said looking at overdose numbers from 1999 to present, pre-pandemic numbers show there were an estimated 74,000 overdose deaths when the CDC reported the data in March of 2020, and when we hit the peak of the pandemic by January of 2022, there were over 110,000 overdose deaths.
As of April 2024, the CDC is estimating over 103,000 reported overdose deaths. She said while that’s a 10% decrease, and the first since 2018 the U.S. has experienced, it’s a 10% decrease from pandemic numbers, not pre-pandemic numbers.
“When you look at the pre-pandemic numbers being 74,000, and the most recent numbers being at 103,000, that’s still an astronomical number of people we are losing in the United States,” said Murphy.
Murphy said the rise in the deadly drug Fentanyl has also made a significant impact on the epidemic in the last couple of years as well, particularly impacting the nation’s youth.
Data shows that since 1999, overdose deaths have increased by 500% among 15 to 24 year olds. Those between 14 to 18 experienced a 94% increase in overdose deaths from 2019 to 2020, further data reveals, and a 20% increase from 2020 to 2021.
Murphy said the evidence indicates that it’s young people who are not typically active drug users but who are trying illicit non-opioid drugs that are being laced with deadly substances.
“A lot of times what we’re seeing with the younger population is that they’re taking something they believe is Adderall, but it’s a counterfeit Adderall pill that probably doesn’t have Adderall in it at all, it’s Fentanyl,” she said.
However, Murphy said she doesn’t want to discredit the fact that there was a decrease in overdose deaths despite it not being a milestone number to truly celebrate just yet.
Through increasing interventions and efforts to mitigate the situation, such as Naloxone education and distributions, 12-step treatment programs, and city and county efforts being conducted through newly-formed quick response teams that offer mental health support to those who have overdosed, Murphy said all of this has mostly-likely contributed to the overdose death decline, but it’s still not enough.
She said these intervention efforts are another factor that’s difficult to determine the correlation between them and the actual decline in overdose deaths.
For instance, Murphy said it’s easy to say a certain amount of Naloxone was distributed into the community, but taking all scenarios of this into account, it doesn’t mean that it’s always necessarily being directly put into the hands of those who need the overdose-reversing medication most of all.
“That could also mean that the Naloxone is sitting on a shelf within a public health department, within an organization, she said. “Naloxone saturation is only good if the Naloxone is actually getting out there into the hands of the people.”
Murphy said there needs to be additional research on how these efforts are actually contributing to the overdose decrease. In addition, she said people also need to be adequately trained on how to use Naloxone and how to respond to an overdose.
Murphy said through funding like opioid settlement dollars, state opioid response funds and private funding, we must continue to expand these measures to combat the crisis.
A major contribution to West Virginia’s increased opioid response efforts has been through the recent opioid settlement itself and the formation of the West Virginia First Foundation charged with delivering those funds granted through the settlement out to counties and cities across the state. AP News reported that the WV First Foundation alone was expected to receive around $367 million from the settlement over the next five years to help tackle the opioid crisis in the state.
Murphy said she believes the foundation and its first round of grants have successfully identified four critical areas to tackling the problem, such as the need to expand and improve accessibility to treatment as well as educate youth.
She said in some ways, West Virginia could serve as a model for how the rest of the country can address the opioid epidemic.
“We have some great work happening in West Virginia that I feel is really something that can be replicated throughout the country, and so too often I feel like West Virginia is considered the epicenter of the epidemic, and I think we’ve got some major solutions here that the rest of the country can replicate and learn from,” Murphy said.