The numbers still don't add up. Remember that mortality among 25-44 year olds is still incredibly low, and even so drug deaths are only one among several causes of death, not the majority cause of death. If you dig into the data you see that around 15k people die a year from drug related deaths in that age range. That's a big number but orders of magnitude too low to explain where the addicts seem to go as people get older.

According to the mortality data there would need to be much fewer than 1 million addicts in the 25-44 age range in the US for a majority of them to be dying before they get out of that age group, or even a sizable minority. And everything we know on addiction statistics puts that number much higher, at 10-20 million or more.

The data just isn't there. Addicts aren't going away because they are dying, period.