Statement from Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, Ph.D. on International Overdose Awareness Day

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

This International Overdose Awareness Day, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) joins people around the world to remember and grieve lives lost to overdose and to reinforce our collective efforts to prevent future deaths. Together, we can save lives.

We are partnering with Tribes, states, territories, and communities to ensure that people at high risk for overdose and those most likely to witness it have as much access to life-saving naloxone and other overdose reversal medications as possible. We are working with these same groups to promote protective factors that make kids less likely to experiment with alcohol, tobacco or other drugs. We are focused on advancing changes to federal regulations that make it easier for providers and patients to make substance use disorder treatment work for them. We're empowering people with lived experience to offer guidance and support to others along their own journeys. And for the first time, SAMHSA has developed a harm reduction framework that establishes how harm reduction principles can be used to directly prevent overdoses, including funding the distribution of fentanyl and xylazine test strips.

It can be hard to take time to sit with the enormity of loss to overdose, but it is important that we do so. When we come together to remember our loved ones, and share their stories, that weight can be a little bit easier to bear.

Together we can prevent overdose. Together we can care for those in need. Together we can grow our communities of recovery.