Overdose Crisis: Progress, Challenges, Lived Realities

Overdose deaths declined in 2024, offering a moment of cautious hope. But provisional data from 2025 shows that this progress is uneven, fragile, and already reversing in some places.

In this 90-minute, discussion-centered workshop, we’ll take a look at what’s happening beneath the headlines. Together, we’ll explore:

• Where harm reduction and treatment investments have saved lives,
• Where funding cuts and policy shifts are creating new risks, and
• How an increasingly unpredictable drug supply is reshaping overdose danger

This session centers lived experience. It’s a space to ask hard questions, make sense of trends, and reflect on the very real human impact of overdose on people who use drugs, their loved ones, and the workers and peers supporting them.

Whether you come to learn, share, grieve, or connect, you’re invited into a thoughtful and heartfelt conversation about what these trends mean on the ground and what they call us to do next.