Chicago confronts changing drug supply as US overdose deaths fall

Officers at Chicago’s Cook County jail searched prisoners’ books and letters for drug-soaked paper during an August raid witnessed by BBC reporter Quentin Sommerville. It is one example of how authorities are responding to a changing drug supply — a local danger that does not, on its own, show that the US overdose death toll is rising. [2]

The BBC puts US overdose deaths at around 110,000 in 2022 and roughly 70,000 in 2025. Chicago’s health department also reported 19% fewer ambulance responses to opioid-related overdoses from January to August 2024 than in the same period of 2023. The local figure measures emergency responses, not deaths, and neither figure establishes what happened in Chicago in 2026. [1] [3]

In Sommerville’s report, reproduced by The Local US, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said staff found burned paper near prisoners who had died or been revived during a rise in overdoses in 2023. The BBC reported that eight inmates died after seizures that year. Officers focused on paper during the August 2026 search because drugs had been found soaked into letters and book pages, the report said. [2]

Beyond the jail, Karen Bell, a recovery worker with Liv4Lali, told the BBC that people buying drugs often cannot tell what has been mixed into them. Her organisation distributes strips that test for fentanyl, medetomidine, xylazine and other substances. [2]

The risk from changing mixtures was documented locally in 2024. Chicago’s health department said toxicology results indicated that medetomidine, a veterinary anaesthetic, was likely involved in at least 38 overdoses between 11 and 17 May. In a separate West Side outreach effort, workers met 1,072 people and distributed 868 kits containing naloxone by 6 September that year. Those distribution totals show the reach of the effort, not its effect on deaths. [3]