Fatal drug overdoses in Oregon fell in 2024, the first year-over-year drop since 2016.
The decline is largely due to fewer fentanyl overdoses, according to a new report from the Oregon Health Authority.
FILE - A Portland Police officer holds five fentanyl “blues” confiscated in Portland, Ore., Dec. 13, 2023.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
The reversal, after years of a rising death toll from street drug use in Oregon, is consistent with national trends. Researchers have identified 2023 as an inflection point, when deaths due to fentanyl overdoses stopped accelerating.
In Oregon, there were 1,544 overdose deaths in 2024, a 16% annual decline.
State health officials said they’re still finalizing data for last year, but it appears the decline continued in 2025.
“We’re encouraged by these drops, but we can’t let up now,” said Dr. Tom Jeanne, deputy state health officer and epidemiologist with the Oregon Health Authority. “Our overdose rates are still far above where they were five, six years ago.”
There could be several reasons for the recent decline.
In an article recently published in The Lancet, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the surge and then decline in overdose deaths occurred largely due to fentanyl saturating the market.
Over the course of a decade, fentanyl went from being an adulterant — added to other drugs to reduce their cost and increase their potency — to replacing commonly-used opioids like heroin outright in many parts of the country, including Oregon.
The risk was highest during this transition, when the presence of fentanyl in street drugs was rapidly increasing. During that period, people using opioids were expecting a less potent drug.
“Fentanyl is so potent, about 100 times more potent than morphine, so it’s really dangerous for people who are not familiar with it,” Jeanne said. “It takes a while for that to kind of ripple through and for users to become used to the changes.”
The CDC researchers also hypothesized that the decline in overdoses was due to a shrinking population of people using opioids, for several reasons.
One particularly grim theory is that the proliferation of fentanyl rapidly killed so many high-risk opioid users that it shrank the population at risk of an overdose, contributing to the trend of fewer deaths.
Those researchers also believe that fewer people are starting opioid use, thanks to the effort to reduce overprescribing of drugs like OxyContin.
Other scientists have proposed different explanations, pointing to some evidence that the purity of street fentanyl dropped significantly in 2023, possibly due to authorities in China cracking down on exports of the chemicals used to manufacture it.
