Good News! Drug overdose deaths just fell for the third year in a row.

Quietly, slowly, unevenly, America turned the corner on the worst drug crisis in modern history.

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. For today’s Good News Sunday, I want to talk about a plague that ravaged this country — and that, while most of us were watching something else, has begun to genuinely turn around.

The CDC released new data this past Wednesday on drug overdose deaths in America. In 2025, those deaths fell by about 14 percent from the year before. That means roughly 11,000 fewer Americans died of overdoses last year than the year before. Mothers, sons, neighbors.

That is the third year in a row overdose deaths have fallen in this country, and the longest sustained decline in decades. At the peak in 2022, we were losing around 110,000 Americans a year to overdose. The 2025 number was about 70,000. That is still a public health emergency. But it is also a 36 percent drop from the peak, in just three years. We are now back to roughly the death toll of 2019, before the pandemic and the deadliest stretch of the fentanyl wave.

When I served in Congress, the opioid crisis was the thing every member dealt with, no matter what kind of district they represented — urban, rural, red, blue. I even introduced a bill in 2018 that directed Medicare and Medicaid to develop a real plan for covering medication-assisted treatment for addiction, which was subsequently signed into law as part of a larger opioid-response package. And mine was one of dozens. Tons of members of both parties worked on those bills, year after year, package after package. And then the headlines moved on.

Here is what was happening while the cameras were pointed elsewhere.

Naloxone — the nasal spray that reverses an opioid overdose — went over-the-counter in 2023. CVS and Walgreens started carrying it next to the Tylenol.

Medicaid expanded coverage of buprenorphine, one of the most effective treatments for opioid use disorder we have.

Red states and blue states alike decriminalized fentanyl test strips.

State legislatures passed Good Samaritan laws so the person calling 911 when their friend was dying wouldn’t go to jail for it themselves.

Police departments started carrying Narcan in their cruisers as standard kit. Drug courts expanded.

Recovery coaches got embedded in emergency rooms.

None of that made the front page. All of it was the work of state legislators, public health workers, ER nurses, paramedics, police departments, recovery coaches, and the families of the people we had already lost. And almost every single one of those interventions was an idea that conservatives and liberals argued about for years and then suddenly agreed on because every congressional district was impacted by the epidemic.

The results are now showing up everywhere on the map. Oregon’s overdose deaths are down 35 percent. North Carolina is down 34 percent. New York is down 32 percent. Alabama is down 28 percent. You will struggle to find a more politically diverse set of four states in this country. They are all bending the same curve.

We still have a long way to go, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Roughly 70,000 Americans still died of overdose last year while a handful of states — Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico — saw their numbers go the other way. And the federal investments that built this turnaround are not guaranteed to continue.

So step back for a second. Quietly, slowly, unevenly, America turned the corner on the worst drug crisis in its modern history. We did it through dozens of small bipartisan bills, state by state and county by county, mostly written by people whose names you will never know. The opioid epidemic was not solved by any one person or any one party. It was worked on by OUR country. Together.

When we stop talking about something, that is not always a sign of failure. Sometimes it is a sign of progress.

And that, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

- Adam