25-05-2025
CDC: Ohio helps lead charge in overdose death decreases
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Recently released statistics from the CDC are shedding a light on drug overdose deaths in the nation. Ohio had one of the biggest declines in predicted deaths last year compared to 2023.
'The numbers really speak for itself,' Hanad Duale, president of recovery support organization the UNIK Foundation, said. 'These numbers are extremely encouraging for us as clinicians.'
There are several organizations in central Ohio leading the charge in prevention, including UNIK Foundation and This Must Be The Place. Both nonprofits received the fourth round of state opioid and stimulant grant funds, which has helped them provide much needed resources to prevent and decrease opioid overdoses. The organizations said the new numbers are encouraging but there's still a lot of work that needs to be done.
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'Nothing makes me more proud than to say I'm from Columbus, Ohio, the state that is leading the way in overdose prevention,' William Perry, director of outreach operations at This Must Be The Place, said.
According to the data released by the CDC, all but two states saw declines in overdose deaths last year with some of the biggest in Ohio and other states that have been hard-hit in the nation's decades-long overdose epidemic.
'Every morning that I wake up, I cannot help but think how I am blessed to have made it on the other side of this and that I'm able to give back in the very neighborhoods and streets that I know are in so much need because I lived there,' William Perry, director of outreach operations at This Must Be The Place, said.
Nationwide, there were 30,000 fewer deaths in 2024 than the year before, the largest one-year decline ever recorded. Ohio emerged as a leading state with a more than 35% decline. Local organizations leading the charge in prevention attribute a lot of this to the continued investment at the state level.
'What's really important and what Ohio has done is remove the bipartisan element to overdose prevention and just say, 'no, we will not stand for this anymore,'' Perry said. 'We will not stand for our residents dying.'
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Local organizations said the only way out of the opioid epidemic is everyone working together.
'By tackling mental health and substance abuse, we keep families together, and that reduces the overall burden on the taxpayer,' Duale said. 'That reduces the overall burden on schools, on teachers.'
But as funding dwindles, organizations say there's a lot of uncertainty about how this will impact the work they're doing in the community.
'When people think of the loss of federal funding, they think of that as like a nationwide problem,' Perry said. 'But in the cutbacks of the NARCAN distribution funds, those are funds that come directly to the states.'
Therefore, the states don't have money or are going to have diminished amounts of money to purchase this very expensive medicine.
'Access is the key thing here,' Duale said. 'Access leads to prevention and prevention hopefully would decrease the numbers.'
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