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Drug Overdose Deaths
About This Indicator
What Are Overdose Deaths?
Drug overdose deaths per 100,000 residents, whatever the intent, yearly since 1999 from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. The rate is age-adjusted, so a country growing older does not move the line by itself.
Why Does It Matter?
Overdoses mostly kill people in their working years, so each takes decades of life; they helped pull national life expectancy down in the mid-2010s.
Can Politics Influence Them?
Through the supply of opioids, prescribed and smuggled, access to treatment and to naloxone, which reverses an overdose, and enforcement.
Key Idea
The rate counts deaths, not users: it can climb without more people using drugs if what they buy turns deadlier. From 1999 to 2022 it rose more than fivefold under presidents of both parties, so a term's change here says as much about what was on the street as about what was done in office.
Scored: A Faster Fall or Slower Rise Ranks Better
Source: CDC National Center for Health Statistics. Health, United States table ODMort for 1999-2017; data.cdc.gov rdjz-vn2n from 2018, and 489q-934x for any newer year.
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