LA County drug-related overdose deaths, including from fentanyl, declined in 2024
Drug-related overdoses and poisoning deaths dropped by 22% in 2024 over the previous year in Los Angeles County, marking the most significant reduction in county history, county health officials reported on Wednesday.
This includes a 37% reduction in fentanyl-related deaths, said Dr. Gary Tsai, the county’s director of its Substance Abuse Prevention and Control Bureau.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid that’s 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. It’s manufactured on the cheap and sold on the street or online, masquerading as the real thing. A single pill can pack enough fentanyl to kill.
The fentanyl crisis began peaking in 2020 and was killing substance abusers on the streets of LA County. The powerful drug also resulted in accidental poisonings of teenagers who ordered oxycontin or ecstasy (MDMA) through social media sites that were tainted with fentanyl.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 107,622 Americans died of drug poisonings in 2021 and of those, 66% were related to synthetic opioids, including fentanyl.
In L.A. County, the overdose rate for young people more than doubled from 2020 to 2022, mostly due to the spread of fentanyl.
Unintentional opioid deaths specifically due to fentanyl rose from 31 in 2014 to 255 in 2018, according to the LA County Department of Health Services. In the county, the synthetic opioid was responsible for 1,504 fatal overdoses in 2021, a 1,280% increase from 109 overdoses in 2016.
In San Bernardino County, the number of fentanyl overdose deaths increased tenfold from 2018 to 2021, the county’s health department reported.
The drop in overdose deaths in 2024 is being attributed to prevention programs, as well as the distribution of fentanyl detection kits and the overdose-reversing drug, naloxone, supplied under the brand name Narcan, distributed to county libraries, schools, substance abuse clinics and first responders, said Tsai.
“Now is the time to continue use of prevention programs. Now is not the time to take our foot off the gas,” Tsai said.
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