One Step Forward - Three Steps Back

For three consecutive years, the United States has recorded more than one hundred thousand overdose deaths. That figure is often repeated as a headline number, but it obscures the churn underneath: periods when prevention and treatment gained traction, when death curves bent downward, followed by reversals driven by policy retreat, fragmented execution, and the steady evolution of a more toxic drug supply. This episode is about those reversals. It is about what happens when a hard‑won advance is met with a cut, a lapse, or a shrug—and why the consequences of “less” in an overdose crisis reliably become “more” funerals.

By Niklas S Osterman BHPRN, MA