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Special Report: 2025 Fatal Overdoses
2,097 deaths were reported to the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office during the 2025 calendar year. Jurisdiction was accepted for 1,078 of these deaths, requiring further investigation and certification. Postmortem examinations were performed on 796 cases. Of the cases investigated, 216 deaths were due to overdose with illicit drugs, medications, alcohol or other substances.
Of the 216 overdose deaths, 199 were accidents, 14 were suicides, two deaths were of undetermined manner, and one death was a homicide. Of these overdose deaths, men accounted for 154 deaths (71.3%) and women accounted for 62 deaths (28.7%).
Note: Please see the noteworthy trends and appendix at the end of this report. Multiple drugs or medications may be involved in one case; therefore, one should not add the numbers of individual substances. The same case may be represented multiple times with different drugs or drug categories. For example, a death due to fentanyl is included in both the fentanyl and opioid totals.
Overdose by city reflects the location of injury (overdose). In some cases, the location of death is different than the location of injury because of transport to a medical facility prior to death.