The Opioid Crisis Isn’t White

Mr. Shihipar is a graduate student in public health.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opinion/opioid-crisis-drug-users.html

Excerpt:

“The Gentrification of Addiction” read one headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Why Is the Opioid Epidemic Overwhelmingly White?” asked NPR. Teen Vogue pointed out that “The Opioid Crisis Only Became a Crisis When It Affected White People.”

But the opioid epidemic is not entirely white — and it’s a mistake to characterize it that way, given how opioids are harming nonwhite communities.

According to statistics collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation, black people made up 12 percent of all opioid-related fatal overdose victims in 2017, with 5,513 deaths, more than double the number in 2015. (Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 78 percent of all victims — 37,113 deaths in total, a 37 percent increase from 2015 — and Hispanics 8 percent.)

Twelve percent may not seem like a lot, but it is roughly proportional to the number of African-Americans in the United States population as a whole. In some areas, most victims of fatal overdoses are black, as in the District of Columbia, where black people make up more than 80percent of opioid-related deaths. In Massachusetts, meanwhile, opioid death rates are going down for all other groups, but continue to rise for black people.