overdose death – Opiate Nation

Not the Time to Rest on Our Laurels

(Translation into most languages a tab to the right.)

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

In ancient Greece, when athletes competed and won, they were given a laurel wreath as a crown to show off their success. The idiom “resting on one’s laurels” refers to being content with our past accomplishments and not working towards any further improvement. Not exerting any effort and becoming complacent.

I am concerned that we might become complacent after hearing the recent encouraging news from the CDC that drug-related deaths among young people under the age of 35 are finally declining. This after more than two decades of year after year grim news about young people dying from opioid overdoses. And especially from the last 10 years from fentanyl. “Provisional data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate there were an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2024—a decrease of 26.9% from the 110,037 deaths estimated in 2023.Annual drug overdose deaths are projected to reach their lowest level since 2019.” (1)

NPR’s Morning Edition discussed the possible reasons for this decline. (2) In Gen Z young people, the fear of overdose has caused a change in what they experiment with as opposed to Millennials like my son. When he was at the age of experimentation in middle school, highly addictive prescription opioids were the drug of choice. Now, Gen Z experimentation is mostly with weed and psychoactive drugs which normally won’t cause death, although they can be laced with fentanyl which may lead to a new and more deadly addiction. But those age 35 and older who are still living desperate lives addicted to ever-stronger synthetic opioids and/or meth are still dying from overdoses.

And then there is Narcan, the opioid overdose reversal medication that is now widely available and is attributed with saving thousands of lives. Parents and advocates have been working for a decade to make it easy to obtain and administer. But it is not the silver bullet many people hail it as. For opioid addicted people, many have been brought back from overdose only to continue using drugs and thinking they have a quick solution to their long-term problem. But repeated overdoses are causing serious brain injuries from oxygen deprivation, as Sam Quinones writes (3).

Author of Dreamland: True Tales of America’s Opiate Epidemic (2015) and The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth (2022), Sam says, “By leaving people on the street to suffer more overdoses, believing that with Narcan they’ll be revived and return to ‘normal,’ we are creating a population of people less able to make rational decisions, more given to erratic behavior, and more at the mercy of the street and its trauma…(Narcan) has great benefits, but also serious limits, particularly in a time of fentanyl and meth, and particularly when it is used virtually without any other tool.”

What’s the answer to this blight that was unleashed on our young people?

Sam continues, “After reporting on this for more than a decade, I believe the solution must start with getting people off those lethal streets and — crucially — into places they cannot leave when the drugs insist that they must. That way, their brains will have a fighting chance to heal. When that happens, readiness for treatment is far more likely to emerge than it will on those streets, where drugs and brain injury so easily conspire and lead to death.”

I encourage you to read Sam’s article for other great insights and pass it along to others. We need to be informed with a perspective gained from all the facts and then work for comprehensive reforms in policies and health care.

U.S. Overdose Deaths Decrease Almost 27% in 2024. May 14, 2025

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2025/20250514.htm

2. Drug deaths plummet among young Americans as fentanyl carnage eases.

Morning Edition June 10, 2025

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/10/nx-s1-5414476/fentanyl-gen-z-drug-overdose-deaths?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20250610&utm_term=10186449&utm_campaign=news&utm_id=6355467&orgid=201&uniquet=CYeV6IcF5gy8kS5Vlimppw&utm_att1=

3. Sam Quinones. The Limits of Narcan Alone. June 04, 2025.

https://samquinones.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-narcan-alone

2021 International Overdose Awareness Day August 31

Translation into most languages at tab to the right.

The need has never been more urgent to alert us all to the risk of overdose facing millions of people worldwide. During the 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic, overdose deaths have risen approximately 30% in many parts of the world due to isolation, unstable drug sources, and lack of reliable medical and recovery help. Even the normal inadequate support services have been seriously disrupted and diverted. And the hope of C19 disappearing sometime soon is now seen as wishful thinking – it is a new deadly virus we will have to learn how to live with.

So, what can we do to help prevent further loss of lives for those already struggling with addiction?

What Would They Say?

(Short topical blog based on Opiate Nation – translation into most languages in tab on right.)

August 2^nd is the seventh anniversary of our son’s death. JL died of a heroin overdose in the early morning hours of that Saturday in 2014. He was 25 years old.

In 2020 alone, 93,000 people died of drug overdoses in the USA – hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Millions in the past few decades. These were beloved daughters, sons, partners, parents, friends, relatives. I think I can confidently say they did not want to be addicted and if they could have turned back the clock to the time before they began using drugs, they would have.

Ghost Stories

(Short topical blogs based on Opiate Nation – translation into most languages in tab on right.)

When we hear the phrase “ghost stories” most of us think of scary and spooky stories shared around a campfire with the intended, and predicable, consequence of keeping us awake at night.

But when H Lee (aka Harris Insler) decided to call his new podcast series “These Ghosts Must Be Heard”, it wasn’t because he would be interviewing people with paranormal experiences. And although the stories his guests share aren’t scary in the ghoulish sense, they have kept their narrators awake at night for days, weeks, and months on end. John and I included. (To hear our interview with Harris, see links below for Podbean, Amazon, Spotify.)

https://theseghostsmustbeheard.podbean.com/

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/3392919b-b8bc-46b4-a486-5e34b7d8dd1d/episodes/580578a3-691f-418a-a179-8bc5f72dd138/these-ghosts-must-be-heard-episode-2-jl

These are real-life experiences and these “ghosts” are the spirits of our deceased loved ones: children, friends, partners who have succumbed to premature and preventable deaths from opioid overdoses.

Gilded Grief

(Short topical blogs based on Opiate Nation – translation into most languages in tab on right.)

While reading Rising Strong by Brené Brown, I was struck by a thought she shared about our American culture and the absence of honest conversation and the hard work it takes for us to rise strong after a fall on our face – a failure. She worries that “this lack of honesty about overcoming adversity has created a Gilded Age of Failure.”

Gilding is a perfect word-picture for this characteristically human behavior: applying a very thin coating of gold to a plain, inexpensive object that gives it the appearance of gold. This is what we do when we are dishonest about our feelings. We are choosing to make our real, plain, and common story appear better than it is.

“We’ve all fallen…but scars are easier to talk about than they are to show with all the remembered feelings laid bare…We much prefer stories about falling and rising to be inspirational and sanitized…We like recovery stories to move quickly through the dark so we can get to the sweeping redemptive ending.” (Rising Strong, Introduction)

The Cost of Secrets

(Fourteenth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

When Breaking Bad was released in 2008, our son, and most of his generation of young people, watched it. He told us about it and encouraged us to watch it while also warning us that there would be some parts we wouldn’t like – but to keep watching. We did and he was right. But JL knew that we wanted to be connected to his life through the media he viewed and so we became fully engaged and finished the series.

When I think back about it now I realize that we didn’t fully ‘get’ why JL wanted us to watch this series. I believe now that he wanted us to understand the complications and conflicts that drug use brings into a life, perhaps knowing it would reveal secrets that he just couldn’t talk about with us directly. His life was complicated and so he lived with many inner conflicts. It is the inescapable nature of any addiction.

Avoiding Pain

(Thirteenth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

We are living in particularly precarious times – for people born since WWII, unprecedented problems the world over – seemingly beyond our ability to control or to deal with effectively. With the Coronavirus pandemic, complex problems have arisen for our global society to attempt to solve, from the manufacturing and transport of medical supplies and personal protective equipment to the best medical treatments and the development of a vaccine – which is viewed by many as the magic potion but only if the majority of people could be convinced to ‘get the jab.’

During this extraordinary year pain has come into most of our lives in ways we have not experienced previously: physical pain from contracting Covid19, emotional pain from being isolated or from watching those we know or care for becoming sick and dying, and mental pain from the anxiety caused by all the unknowns surrounding the pandemic. For people living in poverty, these problems are compounded.

Science Fiction and Self-Protection

(Sixth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

I have always loved Star Trek. From the early 1960’s shows with the corny scripts and goofy hairdos to the 21^st century high-tech and high-stakes extravaganzas. Science fiction envisions the future for us and pushes inventions and technology from getting “beamed-up” in a flash to having a force field to deflect foreign objects.

The concept of a force field would be an incredible tool to have at our disposal – to be able to switch it on and off at will. And I can think of no better time to employ an emotional force field than during the early days and weeks after a sudden death. When it takes all your energy just to exist, to wake up and to face the next moment. An invisible barrier for self-protection.

Lifespan of Heroin & Opioid Addicts

(Second in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right. If you feel this blog is important, please repost to your social media using the buttons below. Thank You!)

When our 25 yr old son died of a heroin overdose in 2014, the statistics for the average life-span of a heroin addict was 5 years. Five years. Not very long if you are 15 or 20 or even 30, the age when most young adults’ nowadays are just getting in gear with their career, a long-term relationship, and planning a family. To have your life swept away before you have a chance to experience some of the most wonderful years of living on this earth is painful to consider.

Woefully Unprepared

(Today begins a series of topical blogs based on excerpts from Opiate Nation, chapter by chapter, that will run for 28 weeks. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

It’s a bit ironic that as I begin blogging through Opiate Nation we are in the midst of a pandemic. Ironic in several significant ways.

Opiate Nation was written because of the opioid epidemic – which, in reality, is a pandemic. Every industrialized nation, and many emerging and third-world nations too, are dealing with the results from the ease of availability of opioids, whether natural and home-grown, or synthetic and imported. Or both, as is the case in America.

And like the Coronavirus pandemic that crept up on us so gradually that it’s deadliness caught us by surprise and mostly unprepared as nations, the opioid epidemic crept up on us too. In both cases, certain international players were unscrupulous for various reasons, causing delays in awareness when there might have been a chance for all of us to not be caught off balance.

The “inoculation” that should have happened, especially in the United States, by way of accurate scientific information disseminated by responsible leaders, didn’t happen. Instead, false information fueled by political agendas and financial motivation created a scenario that so crippled a timely public health response that, for many nations, it became too little too late.