By his own description, Nabarun Dasgupta digs through drug overdose data obsessively, scrutinizing the latest numbers from around the U.S. for clues about America's deadly overdose crisis.

In 2024, the researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was one of the first scientists in the country to realize something new was happening: "I was going through [reports] state-by-state and all the graphs kind of pointed downwards," Dasgupta told NPR.

Fatal overdoses were dropping fast, the biggest, most hopeful shift in decades. At a time when many politicians and most experts were talking about what seemed like an unstoppable fentanyl crisis, Dasgupta showed deaths had actually been declining steadily in many states since 2021.

"It has been a complete shock, the numbers declini

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