This column discusses deaths from drugs and suicide. It describes statistics and ideas; it is not advice.
England and Wales recorded 5,519 drug-poisoning deaths in 2025 and, for the first time since 2012, a lower rate: 92.4 per million. Émile Durkheim would have looked past the fall to the spread. The figures, published on 4 November 2026 by the Office for National Statistics, put his sociology to a hard test.
A year earlier the count was 5,565 and the age-standardised rate 93.9 per million. The ONS says this was the first annual fall in the rate since 2012. That is welcome. It is also the smaller part of the story.
Spread is the bigger story. The North East had the highest regional rate, 135.2 per million; London the lowest, 58.3. Men's rate was 2.3 times women's, and in 2025 it rose while women's fell. One country, one year, one definition, and a gap that wide.
What Durkheim claimed
In Le Suicide (1897) he argued that a society's suicide rate, which he called "le taux social des suicides", is a fact in its own right and needs a social explanation. Two of his variables matter here. One was integration: "Le suicide varie en raison inverse du degré d'intégration des groupes sociaux dont fait partie l'individu" (our translation: suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups to which the individual belongs).
The other was regulation. Where the norms that restrain desire break down, he wrote, anomie becomes "un facteur régulier et spécifique de suicides" in modern societies.