US drug overdose deaths fell to roughly 70,000 in 2025, down from about 81,400 in 2024, according to CDC provisional data reported by CBS News [1]. That is a decline of about 11,400 deaths, or 14 percent, and it is the third consecutive annual drop, the longest such stretch in decades [1].
Measured against the worst year, the change is larger. Overdose deaths peaked at roughly 110,000 in 2022 [1]. The 2025 figure is about 40,000 below that, a fall of roughly 36 percent from peak, and CBS reports the total is back near pre-pandemic 2019 levels [1].
The decline was broad rather than concentrated in one drug. Deaths involving fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine all fell [1].
Seven states went the other way. Overdose deaths rose by 10 percent or more in those states, including Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico [1]. That detail sits inside the same dataset as the national decline, and CBS reports it alongside the good number rather than after it. A resident of Phoenix or Albuquerque is inside a national improvement that is not happening where they live, and the seven-state exception is the part of this dataset that most directly determines whether the trend holds.
Brandon Marshall, a researcher at Brown University, framed the risk in the direction of travel rather than the level. "If deaths are going down rapidly, that means they can increase just as rapidly if we take our foot off the gas." [1] The remark is a caution about the mechanics of a fast-moving number: whatever combination of naloxone distribution, supply changes and treatment access produced a 14 percent drop can stop producing it.
The sourcing carries a documented limit. These are CDC and NCHS figures, but cdc.gov returned an HTTP 403 error on every attempt to fetch the agency's own data brief, so this account rests on CBS News reporting the federal data, not on the federal release read directly [1]. The CBS report was published May 13, 2026, which makes the numbers roughly eleven weeks old at the time of writing. They are provisional, which means CDC revises them as death certificates finish processing.
What those caveats do not touch is the shape of the thing. Three consecutive years of decline, a 14 percent single-year fall, and a total roughly 40,000 below the 2022 peak describe a crisis that stopped getting worse and started getting substantially better, in a country where roughly 70,000 people still died of an overdose last year.
