NBC News: Opioids claiming more African-American lives as overdoses spread from Rust Belt to East Coast

For much of its horrific history, the faces of the deadly opioid epidemic that ravaged the Rust Belt and killed more than 350,000 Americans since 1999 were largely white.

That is rapidly changing as the plague spreads to the big cities on the East Coast, according to a study released Friday by a quartet of researchers led by Stanford University’s Mathew Kiang.

“Although opioid-related mortality has been stereotyped as a rural, low-income phenomenon concentrated among Appalachian or Midwestern states, it has spread rapidly, particularly among the eastern states,” the researchers reported in the study that was published in JAMA.

The result is “a wider range of populations being affected, with the spread of the epidemic from rural to urban areas and considerable increases in opioid-related mortality observed in the black population.”

For example, the death rate from opioids in the District of Columbia, where nearly half the residents are black, has tripled every year since 2013.

Why is it spreading?

“Heroin,” Kiang told NBC News.

Specifically, fentanyl-laced heroin which is 25 to 50 times more powerful than straight heroin and fast becoming the fix of choice for big city addicts.

“The heroin on the East Coast is much more lethal than the heroin on the West Coast,” Kiang said.