Wausau Overdose Deaths Top All of 2025 as National Toll Falls

Four people have died of drug overdoses in Wausau this year, one more than the city recorded in all of 2025, according to a police third-quarter report scheduled for the city's Public Health and Safety Committee on Monday. The count runs against a national curve that has been falling for three straight years.

Police responded to 11 overdoses in the city from January through September, seven of them nonfatal, the report states. That already matches the 11 overdoses officers logged in all of 2025, a year in which three people died.

A reversal after four years of decline

The report covers a city in central Wisconsin that had watched its overdose numbers fall steadily since 2021. Police recorded 40 overdoses that year, including 12 deaths, the most on record. The count dropped every year afterward: 35 in 2022, 27 in 2023, 19 in 2024 and 11 in 2025.

Four of this year's overdoses came in the third quarter, including one death. In August, officers found a 22-year-old man dead at a residence, and the medical examiner's findings were consistent with a fentanyl overdose, according to the report. Police arrested a man the same day in connection with the most recent nonfatal overdose, on drug delivery and first-degree recklessly endangering safety charges; he was already on parole for drug trafficking.

Reading a projection built on nine months

The report projects a 33 percent increase in overdoses for 2026 and a 78 percent rise in fatalities, figures that stretch nine months of data across a full year. When the second-quarter report showed a similar jump in July, Patrol Capt. Melinda Pauls said the year-over-year change largely reflected an unusually low first half of 2025.

Pauls also noted a measurement problem that runs in the other direction: police counts miss overdoses that bystanders reverse with naloxone, because many of those never generate a 911 call. The department's numbers therefore describe the cases that reached officers, not every overdose in the city.

With annual totals in the low double digits, small movements carry large percentages. A single additional death changes the fatality rate by double digits, and the report does not attempt to explain why 2026 turned upward.

Wisconsin's numbers, and the national ones

Statewide, overdose deaths peaked at 1,830 in 2022 and fell to 1,772 in 2023 and 1,185 in 2024, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. Opioid overdose deaths alone dropped from 1,422 in 2023 to 818 in 2024, a decline of about 42 percent.

The state has not finalized its 2025 figures. Provisional federal data put Wisconsin's 2025 overdose death rate at 16.4 per 100,000 residents, below the national rate of 20.0, according to a KFF analysis of CDC data. Nationally, the CDC predicts 67,798 overdose deaths in the 12 months ending in March 2026, a 12.3 percent drop from the year before.

State health officials credit wider naloxone distribution, medications for opioid use disorder and years of prevention spending for the decline. The improvement has been uneven from county to county: Brown County recorded 39 overdose deaths in 2025, up from 31 the year before.

What police are counting alongside the overdoses

The same quarterly report tracks the enforcement side of the department's work. Its Community Resource Unit seized more than 413 grams of methamphetamine, 10.7 grams of heroin and fentanyl and 11.2 grams of cocaine in the third quarter, along with six illegally possessed guns. The unit referred 17 people to deflection or treatment programs.

That referral figure is the part of the report that connects drug seizures to the overdose count. Deflection programs route people encountered by police toward treatment instead of charges, and their reach depends on an officer deciding in the moment that a referral is available and appropriate. Availability of naloxone matters to the other side of the ledger, since reversals that never produce a 911 call also never appear in the department's statistics.

The local picture behind a national headline

The tension in Wausau's report is the one public health departments have been navigating all year: aggregate national data show the overdose crisis easing, while individual counties still record years that move the wrong way. Wausau's 2026 total is a single death above a very low baseline, and its 11 overdoses remain a quarter of the 2021 peak. But the same report shows a city where a 22-year-old died of a suspected fentanyl overdose in August and where police made a trafficking arrest alongside the year's most recent nonfatal case.

The Public Health and Safety Committee meets at 5:15 p.m. Monday in the Council Chambers at City Hall, 407 Grant St. People seeking treatment for opioid use disorder can reach the Wisconsin Addiction Recovery Helpline, a free statewide service available around the clock, at 211 or 833-944-4673, and can read about medication-assisted treatment programs here.