Good news doesn’t come around often when discussing overdose numbers, so when it does, it’s worth actually looking at instead of just repeating the headline. Bay County’s overdose numbers are down, and they’re down by a lot. Sheriff Tommy Ford says the county is beating the national trend, and the numbers back him up.
Nationally, overdose deaths fell about 14 percent in 2025. Florida did better, down 22 percent. Bay County did better than that. Deputies used Narcan 83 times in 2021. In 2025, that number was 18. Over the last two years, overdoses in unincorporated Bay County have dropped by roughly 65 percent.
Ford points to a few specific things: fourteen manslaughter arrests connected to fatal overdoses, going after dealers instead of just users, and pushing further up the supply chain instead of stopping at the person who sold the last hit. There’s also Life Line, a jail-based treatment program built to reach people while they’re already in custody instead of waiting for them to ask for help on their own.
What We’re Not Willing to Do Is Take the Number at Face Value
We’re glad the numbers look like this. Some of the drop is almost certainly real, and the enforcement and treatment work behind it deserves credit.
But a number can be true and still be missing something. A Narcan deployment count only measures one thing: a deputy showing up to an opioid overdose and using a drug that reverses opioids. It doesn’t tell you how many people in Bay County are still using. It tells you how many opioid overdoses got a specific response.
Toxicologists have been warning that medetomidine and xylazine are showing up more in the fentanyl supply, and neither one is an opioid, we wrote about Xylazine earlier last year. Narcan doesn’t touch them, doesn’t help at all. If what people are overdosing on is shifting toward drugs naloxone can’t reverse, fewer Narcan deployments could mean the response is changing, not that fewer overdoses are happening. We can’t prove that’s what’s driving Bay County’s numbers. But it’s a real enough possibility that it deserves a mention instead of getting buried under a good headline. Counterpoint to that, xylazine is primarily used alongside opioids, so many of those overdoses would still likely be caught in the opioid overdoses and narcan deployment numbers.
The Number Doesn’t Know You
A countywide death rate can’t see the person who’s using right now and hasn’t had a close call. It can’t see the family managing someone’s addiction quietly, at home, without ever dialing 911. Those people don’t move the statistic either direction, and the fact that Bay County looks better on paper this year doesn’t mean their situation has changed at all.
If that’s you, or someone in your family, this good news wasn’t written for you, and you shouldn’t read it as a sign you’re overreacting by still wanting help.
Give Credit Where It’s Due, and Keep Going
Fewer people dying is real progress. The deputies, the drug unit, the people running Life Line inside the jail, they earned some of this. We’re not trying to take that away from anyone.
We just don’t think the job’s finished because a chart is trending the right way. If you or someone you love is part of the story that number can’t see, that hasn’t changed because Bay County’s doing better on paper. Florida Springs Wellness and Recovery Center is in Panama City, and we treat the person in front of us, not the countywide trend. The number went down. Call us anyway!
