Florida is posting some of the most encouraging overdose numbers in the country. It is also a state with one of the most complicated relationships to the addiction crisis in America, from the pill mills that helped ignite the national epidemic to a treatment industry that has, at times, exploited the very people it promised […]
Delaware is one of the smallest states in the country, and for years it carried one of the heaviest overdose burdens, measured against its size. By the most recent national comparisons, Delaware ranked second only to West Virginia in its rate of fentanyl-involved overdose deaths. A small population, an outsized loss. That history is what […]
For most of the country, 2025 brought the first real relief from the fentanyl crisis in years. Colorado got a different report. While national overdose deaths fell sharply, Colorado became one of a small group of states where the numbers turned back upward, and its largest city recorded one of its worst years on record. […]
California does not fit the story most people carry in their heads about the overdose crisis. It is, by prescribing measures, one of the most cautious states in the country. It also contains some of the most visible, concentrated drug crises in America. Both things are true at once, and holding them together is the […]
Every state’s addiction story has a starting point. In Arkansas, more than in almost anywhere else in the country, that story began at the pharmacy counter. For years the state has led or nearly led the nation in how many opioid prescriptions its doctors write, and that history still shapes the crisis families face today. […]
The national story about overdose in 2026 is, for once, a hopeful one. Deaths have fallen for several years running. Arizona is the exception to that story. While the rest of the country has been recording its first sustained relief from the fentanyl crisis, Arizona has been moving in the opposite direction, and the gap […]
In most of the country, the question facing a family is whether a loved one will accept treatment. In Alaska, there is a second question stacked on top of the first. If they say yes, where exactly do they go, and how do they get there before the willingness fades? That second question is not […]
For the first time in nearly a decade, Alabama is recording fewer overdose deaths than it did the year before. That is worth saying plainly, because families living inside the addiction crisis rarely hear good news. In January 2026, state outlets reported that more than 900 Alabamians died of drug overdoses in the most recent twelve-month […]
In the current landscape of American addiction, fentanyl receives the majority of the public health attention and rightly so. But there is another crisis unfolding in parallel, one that is devastating families in rural communities, suburban neighborhoods, and urban centers alike, and one that presents a clinical profile that is in some ways even more […]
You prepared for weeks. You rehearsed until the words were memorized. You held yourself together while reading the most vulnerable thing you have ever written in front of the person you love most. And they looked at the table, or at the wall, or at you with something that was simultaneously anger and pain, and […]

