The decades-long U.S. opioid epidemic could be hitting Black people harder than white folks as the crisis enters a new phase.
Opioid overdose death rates among Black Americans jumped nearly 40% from 2018 to 2019 in four states hammered by the epidemic, researchers found.
Fatal ODs among all other races and ethnicities remained about the same during that time.
This represents a significant shift in the opioid crisis, which in the early 2000s largely affected white people in rural areas, Dr. Marc Larochelle, an assistant professor at Boston University School of Medicine says.
“Since 2010, we now recognize what people call the ‘triple wave’ of the opioid epidemic,” he says. “The first wave was prescription opioid analgesics, and then 2010 to 2013, increases were largely driven by heroin, and from 2013, it’s been illicit fentanyl infiltrating the drug supply.”
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Racial inequities in U.S. health care and social services are a likely reason for the continued increase in OD deaths among Black Americans, even as deaths among other ethnic groups have leveled out, Larochelle and Dr. Kenneth Stoller, director of the Johns Hopkins Broadway Center for Addiction in Baltimore, who reviewed the study findings share.
The spread of the powerful opioid fentanyl throughout the nation’s illegal drug market has also probably played a role, both add.
“Cocaine and methamphetamine are increasing tainted with fentanyl,” Stoller says. “These other drugs are causing overdoses in people who