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After a Years-long Spike, Humboldt’s Overdose Deaths Seeing Sharp Drop
Following a nationwide trend, overdose deaths appear to have declined sharply in Humboldt County in the first months of 2024 after increasing sharply in recent years since fentanyl became pervasive.

Surveys compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a 10.6-percent decline in fatal overdoses nationwide, with some experts predicting the decline will be even larger once data is finalized.

“In the states that have the most rapid data collection systems, we’re seeing declines of 20 percent, 30 percent,” Nabarun Dasgupta, an expert on street drugs at the University of North Carolina, told NPR.

In Humboldt County, which didn’t record its first fentanyl related overdose death until 2016, several years after the highly potent synthetic drug came to define what officials warned was the third wave of a national opioid epidemic in 2013, fentanyl overdose fatalities were down as much as 30 percent through April based on preliminary data, according to Humboldt County Health Officer Candy Stockton.


The county also appears to be seeing fewer opioid overdose-related hospitalizations, as St. Joseph Hospital spokesperson Christian Hill said the emergency room has seen 62 visits so far this year compared to 118 over the same period in 2023.

Stockton said the decrease may seem like a “sudden change” but is actually the product of a decades-long effort on multiple fronts to reduce overdose fatalities. Nonetheless, it represents some rare good news in the effort to prevent drug overdose deaths locally, where rates have historically been some of the highest in the state.

Since it started showing up in the early 2010s, fentanyl quickly began accounting for a majority of the nation’s overdose deaths, because it’s highly potent and cheap, a dangerous combination that saw dealers and manufacturers quickly begin adding it to everything from counterfeit prescriptions to other street drugs. Because it’s 100 times stronger than heroin, even a tiny amount can cause a deadly reaction. That’s particularly true of users who haven’t built up an opioid tolerance, making it an especially dangerous addition to counterfeit non-opiate prescription pills like benzodiazepines (like Valium and Xanax) and stimulants (like Adderall and Ritalin).

In Humboldt County, none of the 43 overdose deaths reported by the coroner’s office in 2015 tested positive for even a trace of fentanyl. That changed in 2016, when the county found the drug in toxicology results from a single overdose case. The following two years also each saw a single fentanyl-related overdose death in Humboldt. Seemingly overnight, in 2017, that number exploded to 46, quickly making fentanyl the deadliest drug in the county.

Officials warned it was cutting across all demographics — cocaine using partygoers, teens ingesting prescription pills, heroin users and folks who’d developed dependencies on prescription pain pills were all starting to die of overdoses with toxicology reports later coming back positive for fentanyl.

According to the Humboldt County Coroner’s Office, fentanyl accounted for 65 of the county’s 76 overdose deaths in 2022 and 60 of 69 in 2023. But those numbers seemed to fall off sharply at the start of this year, the office reported, with nine fentanyl overdose deaths confirmed through the first three months of 2024. If that trend holds, it would represent a 40-percent decrease over last year, and a 45-percent decrease from 2022.

Stockton cautioned it’s impossible to predict whether the current decline may change over the remainder of the year, also noting that toxicology tests can take up to 10 weeks to confirm, creating an inherent lag between a death and when it is recorded.

“Our data is always at least three months old,” she said.

But there’s reason to believe this is not a fluke, she said.

“From our review of deaths in 2022 and 2023, we know that most deaths are occurring in people who have a history of substance use, and that very few people are dying while they are being prescribed medications to treat substance use disorder,” she said, adding that access to effective medication treatment for substance use disorder has increased. “We also know that naloxone is widely distributed in Humboldt County, and we know of hundreds of reported overdose reversals.”

Naloxone — also commonly referred to by the brand name Narcan — is indeed now much more widely distributed locally than even a year ago, now commonly carried by not only police officers, firefighters and EMTs but also librarians, school staff, some residents and, perhaps most importantly, substance users and their cohorts. Additionally, Stockton pointed out, fentanyl test strips have become much more common, allowing users to know whether the drug is present in whatever they are ingesting.

Ethan Makulec, the executive director of the Humboldt Area Center for Harm Reduction (HACHR), a nonprofit dedicated to improving the health and wellness of people who use drugs, said the numbers also tell a different story.

According to Makulec, HACHR’s internal data indicates an average of 64 overdoses were reversed monthly in 2023 with naloxone among people reached by HACHR’s services, compared with 82 per month in 2024. This would seem to indicate that overdoses are not becoming less frequent, just less deadly with the increased distribution of naloxone. (Makulec said the organization went from distributing about 1,300 doses of naloxone a month in 2023 to more than 1,600 monthly this year.)

“An increase in reported reversals, while demonstrating an increased number of lives saved from overdose, does also indicate an increased risk and frequency of overdose, likely due to the increased risk of overdose from substances like fentanyl occurring in the drug supply, and also caused by the severity of hardships and barriers to care faced by people who use drugs,” Makulec said.

Makulec also pointed out that it’s harm reduction organizations statewide that have carried the bulk of efforts to distribute naloxone, noting that they are responsible for 59 percent of overdose reversals. In Humboldt County, Makulec said HACHR has distributed 37 percent of the naloxone units, according to the California Department of Public Health, more than any other organization, resulting in 43 percent of the county’s reported overdose reversals.

Makulec says HACHR accepts donations and has volunteer opportunities for folks looking to help out. But he says the organization also appreciates public advocacy on its behalf, noting its harm reduction work in Eureka currently faces “severe restrictions” that limit it service sites and times, preventing it “from providing sufficient resources for the number of people in Eureka who are in need.” (For more information, he invites the public to comment HACHR at [email protected].)

Stockton, for her part, also said educational programs on practices that can reduce risk — like using those fentanyl test strips and never using alone — have also made an impact.

“A lot of people are saying this is a ‘sudden change,’ and it is true that seeing this change in outcomes is a sudden change in the numbers,” she said. “The work behind that change has been an ongoing commitment to over a decade of work by medical providers, treatment programs and harm reeducation groups, law enforcement and the criminal justice system, hospitals, schools and community groups that have all worked incredibly hard to implement the changes necessary to save lives in Humboldt County.

“We should be proud of the progress we’ve made,” Stockton continued, “and it’s important that we stay committed to that work, because too many of our friends, family and community members are still dying from overdose.”