for the first time in a decade New Jersey's reporting a year-over-year drop in fatal drug overdoses a Health crisis that's been driven largely by Fentanyl and other deadly substances mixed into street drugs the number of deaths dipped below 3 000 in 2022 and experts say it's a step in the right direction one they believe is attributed to changes in how drug users are able to access treatment providers and life-saving opioid reversal agents like naloxone but when our health care writer Lilo Stainton dug into the numbers she found there's much more to the story she joins me now so Lilo if I just look at these raw numbers is it safe to call this a success for the state I mean it shows treatment works and you know when you provide people access to it you get results now there are caveats to that right we're talking about high quality treatment and what that usually really means in most cases is medication assisted treatment so um buprenorphine methadone things like that so that kind of treatment when people can get it which has historically been a problem it really does work and that's what people believe we're seeing the beginning of now and yet when I read your piece we find it's not necessarily working for everyone what did you dig into and what did you see right so this was the fascinating thing and I I really want to thank some of the the state police and their data um for tracking this because they brought this to light late last year when they were sharing with um the public some of the data from the medical examiner's office and what it shows is that while the the you know overdose deaths fatal overdoses are declining they're not declining among all groups and as is often the case black um adults it does not necessarily men or women but black adults are the ones that are seeing overdose rates actually increase um as well as older people 55 and older apparently of almost any race are seeing overdose numbers increase in those two groups which is really unusual the reason we're seeing it go down overall is because the larger group of drug users and addicts in this pool sort of in the group measured are of course white and so is that because of access issues the places where these clinics the treatments uh the harm reduction centers are located aren't necessarily within proximity to these folks who need it I think that's a little bit still uh TBD but I think that that's probably you're on the right track there um if access works one of the things that's so big about this is we believe it reflects or you know the experts believe it reflects this change in how the the um the policies the change in the policies that allowed it to more people to get into treatment right they were able to take some of these medications home with them for more than a day or two days um things like that they could use telemedicine things that we do commonly for other medications so if we can expand that more in places where people are at meet people or where they are at theoretically could work for more groups yeah yeah when you talk to people who work in this space Not Just policy makers but the people really on the ground doing the work does data like this really inform how they plan to change their I'm going to say their their targeted attack here oh it really does I mean I know um for example you know uh uh some out some people are doing a lot more on mobile Outreach right um Integrity House is about to double its sort of mobile Outreach capacities or or increase greatly their their Outreach capacities um on the street in a van so you know that's one way to get medication assisted treatment directly to people who are sort of in a crisis in the moment um theoretically that could that could start moving the needles on on a broader uh demographic all right great reporting Lilo thanks so much thank you Bri thank you