Older Black Men Face Rising Fentanyl Overdose Deaths
December 22, 2024
According to the report, the majority of men who are dying of opioid overdoses are Black men between the ages of 54 and 73.
The majority of men across America who are dying of opioid overdoses due to fentanyl are Black men between the ages of 54 and 73, a forgotten generation in Baltimore and elsewhere in the country, according to joint reporting from The New York Times and The Baltimore Banner and other newsrooms.
According to the most recent data, Baltimore is at the center of the most severe drug overdose crisis among major U.S. cities.
From 2018 to 2022, the city’s overdose death rate was nearly double that of the next highest major city.
Compounding this crisis is the disproportionate impact on older Black men, who make up a significant portion of those dying from drug overdoses.
Despite this, one of the most prominent deaths attributed to a fentanyl overdose in Baltimore was that of 26-year-old Baltimore Ravens linebacker Jaylon Ferguson at an acquaintance’s home in 2022.
According to Tracie M. Gardner, executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network, as well as a former New York State health official, the deaths of older Black men are ironic because that particular demographic survived so many other epidemics.
“They were resilient enough to live through a bunch of other epidemics — H.I.V., crack, Covid, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis — only to be killed by fentanyl,” Gardner told the New York Times.
Although the analysis by the Times and other outlets concentrates on cities in the Northeast and Midwest, there are other places represented, like San Francisco, where the combination of cocaine and opioids like fentanyl make treating their addictions more difficult.
The use of opioids by Black men in their 50s and 70s can be traced back to the Vietnam War, where many of them were exposed to heroin for the first time, and those men continued to use opioids when they returned home from the war.
As Mark Robinson, a 66-year-old Black man who runs a syringe exchange program in Washington D.C. told the New York Times, Black men of his generation didn’t all of a sudden just start dying from opioids.
“Black men didn’t just start dying,” Robinson said. “We’ve been dying for decades as a direct result of opioid use disorder.”
Further complicating matters, many of the cities with a pattern of drug deaths similar to Baltimore’s share characteristics with the city, including large Black populations, marked residential segregation, and an active heroin marketplace in the ’70s.
“You’re basically disarming them from having a good life,” Ricky Bluthenthal, a professor of public health at the University of Southern California, told the outlet. “They lose girlfriends, they lose houses, they lose connections to their children.”
In addition to this, policies that had the effect of targeting drug users meant that people who needed treatment often received incarceration instead, potentially making it harder for them to stay off drugs.
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