Black residents account for most of Cook County's drop in opioid deaths

Fewer people died of opioid overdoses in Cook County last year than in any other year since at least 2019.

The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office handled 788 opioid-related deaths in 2025, according to the office's case archive. That is 1,215 fewer than in 2022, when the office recorded 2,003 such deaths, a decline of 60.7%.

Last year's count also fell below where it stood before the pandemic. In 2019, the office handled 1,295 opioid-related deaths. Among the years from 2019 through 2025, last year ranked seventh, the fewest deaths of the period.

A decline that has held each year since 2022

Deaths came down in steps rather than all at once. They fell to 1,821 in 2023, then to 1,171 in 2024, before reaching last year's total.

When the medical examiner released preliminary figures for 2024, the county saw the fewest opioid overdose deaths in nearly a decade (blockclubchicago.org). The office reported at the time that homicides and suicides also declined that year (blockclubchicago.org). The 2025 count is lower still.

Tracked quarter by quarter from 2019 through 2025, as in the chart below, the counts offer the clearest way to see whether the county's worst stretch is behind it.

Fewer deaths across working and older ages

The decline reached across age groups. From 2022 to 2025, deaths among people in their fifties fell by 325, and deaths among people in their thirties fell by 262.

Among people in their sixties, the count fell by 171. Older residents still make up a large part of the toll: people in their sixties accounted for 23.1% of the county's opioid-related deaths in 2025.

Black residents still carry the largest share

Opioid-related deaths among Black non-Latino residents fell by 702 from 2022 to 2025. That was a larger decline than among white non-Latino residents, whose deaths fell by 323, or white Latino residents, whose deaths fell by 168.

Even after that decline, Black non-Latino residents made up just over half of the county's opioid-related deaths last year, or 50.8%.

About the data

We used the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office case archive and counted opioid-related deaths by year of death from 2019 through 2025. We compared 2022 with 2025 to measure the change overall and within age bands and race and ethnicity groups, and used quarterly counts to chart the trend.

• Counts for the most recent year may still change as pending cases are closed and toxicology results are added.
• These are raw counts of deaths, not rates adjusted for changes in population.
• The archive records who died and when, and it cannot show which prevention efforts, if any, account for the decline.

Opioid-related death: a death handled by the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office that the office's records classify as involving opioids. Non-Latino and Latino: the race and ethnicity categories recorded in the medical examiner's case records.

Sources

• The publisher's ArcGIS open-data service (named with each dataset): Medical Examiner Archive since 2014, latest period 2026-10-17, released Oct. 17, 2026; retrieved Oct. 18, 2026. Data