The US saw a significant drop in the number of drug overdose deaths. The Trump administration has a shot at keeping the trend going. STAT News's addiction reporter, Lev Facher, explains. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. An addiction recovery billboard in Minneapolis. Photo by Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The US has been dealing with an opioid epidemic for a generation.
It's been bad.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths in America.
And then it got even worse.
During COVID last year, you might recall Sean talked to a Wall Street Journal reporter who had started carrying Narcan in her purse, just in case.
It's very small.
You can fit it anywhere.
I have two doses of it in my purse that I carry all the time.
I hope I never have to use them, but you know, it's pretty easy to carry.
So this is how grim it had gotten.
Ordinary people preparing themselves to intervene in case of an od.
But then over the past year, something unexpected and very, very good happened.
Overdose deaths started dropping fast.
What on earth happened?
Is ahead on today explained.
2025 is going to be a huge year for the tech industry.
AI is either going to take over or maybe kind of start to go away.
Regulation is going to continue and change the tech industry, or maybe a new president is going to change his mind about how all that is supposed to work.
We're going to get new gadgets and new apps and new social platforms competing for our time and attention and new information about what it means to be a person on the Internet and how we should be thinking about that.
We have no idea what's coming next year, but on the Vergecast this month we've decided to speculate wildly Anyway, we're spending our time trying to figure out what's coming next year, what isn't, and what it all means.