Hagerstown recorded 34 overdose deaths in a presentation to the city council, including 27 linked to opioids and 22 involving fentanyl, as Washington County health officials laid out the toll the city continues to carry even as overdose numbers ease elsewhere. The county's mobile recovery response team handled 577 overdose cases overall, and 473 of them — about 82 percent — happened in Hagerstown itself.
The Washington County Health Department presented that data to the Hagerstown Mayor and City Council on October 20, according to localnews1.org. The same presentation detailed naloxone use across the county: emergency medical services administered the overdose-reversal drug 254 times countywide between September 2025 and August 2026, with 190 of those administrations occurring within Hagerstown's 21740 ZIP code.
A Five-Year Plan Takes Shape
In response to the concentration of cases in the city, Washington County and Hagerstown are weighing a five-year plan that would add a peer recovery specialist and a case manager to the health department's three-person mobile recovery team, the outlet reports. Staff on that team generally attempt to contact people within 72 hours of receiving a referral after an overdose. Health officials also want to eventually move to real-time dispatch, allowing recovery specialists to respond alongside emergency medical personnel at the scene of an overdose, with the plan's second year focused on fully rolling out the expanded program and deepening that coordination with EMS.
Two speakers addressed the Hagerstown City Council on the overdose crisis during public comment on October 27, with one of the two speakers coming from Frederick County. Council members requested evening coverage, quarterly reports, and faster neighborhood outreach as part of any expanded response.
Settlement Dollars Move to the County
On the same date, the Hagerstown City Council approved two agreements making the Washington County Health Department the administrative partner for the city's opioid settlement programs, per the same account. The Hagerstown Mayor and City Council had separately approved agreements with the health department to manage opioid settlement funds and abatement services, and city officials said the roughly $436,000 the city voted to route to the health department before a June 30 deadline was too small a sum to sustain a city-run program on its own. The settlement programs will include quarterly reviews, and targeted neighborhood outreach is slated for year three of the broader plan.
County Investments Already Underway
The push for an expanded response builds on steps Washington County has already taken. The county distributed 18,000 naloxone doses and trained more than 1,600 people to administer it in 2023 alone, according to the Washington County Health Department. That same year, the county's fatal overdoses dropped nearly 22 percent between November 2022 and November 2023. The health department has attributed that decline to naloxone distribution, peer and mobile crisis programs, and three crisis-stabilization beds added at Meritus Medical Center through nearly $465,000 in federal SAMHSA grant funding. Those crisis beds allow overdose patients to stay for up to 48 hours while beginning medically assisted treatment.
The county's own naloxone distribution figures and the more recent EMS administration counts measure different things and are not directly comparable, but together they point to a sustained local effort to put the overdose-reversal drug into more hands. Washington County Health Department offers free naloxone at 925 N. Burhans Blvd. in Hagerstown, and residents can reach the department at 240-313-3310.
A Statewide Decline, With a Caveat
The local numbers come against the backdrop of a statewide decline that state agencies describe with slightly different figures. Maryland recorded 1,315 overdose deaths in 2025 — the lowest level in a decade — which the Maryland Department of Health described as a 50 percent decrease from the state's historic 2021 peak of 2,800 deaths. Governor Wes Moore's office, in a May 7 announcement, characterized the same 1,315-death total as a 53 percent decrease from that 2021 peak — a discrepancy the available state sources do not resolve.
Whatever the precise percentage, the trend lines downward, and it's one local health officials and advocates have treated with guarded optimism rather than triumph. Vicki Sterling called the drop obviously a cautious celebration, a framing that captures why Hagerstown's continued share of the burden remains the focus of the city council's attention even as broader state figures improve.
