Chester County accidental overdose deaths dip because of public health response

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Accidental overdose deaths in Chester County have fallen to their lowest level since 2015.

There were 69 such deaths related to drug and alcohol use in 2024, and county officials are projecting another reduction in 2025.

“It’s because of everything everybody is doing in this room — county leadership, our providers, my staff — everything that we’re doing is working,” said Jamie Johnson, director of the county Department of Drug and Alcohol Services, at the Board of Commissioners meeting Wednesday.

Fatalities jumped from 74 deaths in 2015 to 144 deaths in 2017, according to county data. The most frequently identified substances include alcohol, cocaine and fentanyl.

Since 2017, the number of fatalities has steadily declined.

“It means that the community is paying attention to this epidemic,” Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell told WHYY News. “It’s become a focus of schools. It’s become a focus of health care providers. It’s become a focus of prosecutors and all those efforts are making a meaningful difference.”

Chester County is not alone. Philadelphia, too, has seen a decline in drug-related overdose deaths.

Nationwide, drug overdose deaths have reached a five-year low. Experts have attributed the unprecedented decline to the widespread public health response, reductions in drug use and changes in fentanyl supply.

With the help of opioid settlement dollars, Chester County has brought medication-assisted treatment to the county prison, expanded its warm hand-off efforts, increased programming in schools and stepped up recovery efforts, Johnson said. Officials have also boosted the county’s naloxone and test strip reserves.

“We recently started a pilot for an overdose fatality review, so we can begin to identify touch points of where we could have intervened — sooner, more, better — things that we can do to constantly improve ourselves,” Johnson told WHYY News.

In Pennsylvania, there are four types of single-county authority models that counties adopt to administer funding and programs for drug and alcohol treatment. Chester County uses the public executive organizational model, which allows for the work to be handled by a branch of county government rather than an independent organization.

Johnson said this structure allows for continuous support from the county — which also happens to be the only one in the state with a Triple-A rating from three separate agencies.

Maxwell said the state budget impasse and the erosion of federal funding could impact human services that municipalities across Pennsylvania can deliver to residents.

“It’s clear to us here in Chester County that in order for us to meet the goals including investigating child abuse to helping people with addiction, that we’re going to have to do more on the local level if we want to help as many those people as we can,” Maxwell said.