US drug overdoses now killing more black men than white men

In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, the rate of overdose drug deaths among black men exceeded the rate for white men for the first time since 1999, according to researchers who blame an increasing supply of lethal drugs — especially fentanyl — for the deaths.

There were more than 15,200 drug overdose deaths among black men in 2020, more than double the number from four years earlier, researchers at the University of California said in a study published in JAMA Psychiatry on March 2.

The US overdose crisis is worsening due to "an increasingly toxic illicit drug supply" that may disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minority communities, the study's authors wrote. "Drug overdose mortality is increasingly becoming a racial justice issue in the US."

The increase in overdoses among black men is being fueled by widespread use of fentanyl, a fast-acting drug that is 100 times as powerful as morphine. Fentanyl is added surreptitiously to other illegally drugs to enhance their potency.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has said that mass production of such pills by Mexican cartels has escalated. Federal authorities said they are encountering more pills passing for medications such as oxycodone that contain fentanyl. More than 20 million fake pills were seized last year, the vast majority containing fentanyl, according to the DEA.

In 2020, black individuals had the largest percentage increase in overdose mortality (48.8 percent) compared with white individuals (26.3 percent), according to the authors of the study, Joseph Friedman and Dr Helena Hansen.

American Indian or Alaska Natives had the highest rate of overdose deaths in 2020 at 41.4 deaths per 100,000 people, 30.8 percent higher than the rate for white people.

Black people had the second-highest overdose death rate in 2020, at 36.8 per 100,000. That is 16.3 percent higher than the rate for white people, which was 31.6 per 100,000.

Drug overdose rates among Hispanic or Latino people remained the lowest among the groups in the study, at 17.3 per 100,000 in 2020. However, Hispanic or Latino people had a large increase — 40.1 percent — in drug overdose rates in 2020.

The researchers analyzed data on drug overdose deaths between 1999 and 2020 from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database and the National Center for Health Statistics.

Authors of the study wrote that "evidence-based strategies that can be used to reduce increasing inequalities in overdose rates'' include "providing individuals with a safer supply of drugs, closing gaps in health care access (e.g., harm reduction services and medications for opioid use disorder), ending routine incarceration of individuals with substance use disorders, and addressing the social conditions of people who use drugs''.

Since 2015, overdose deaths have been rising most rapidly among black and Hispanic communities, the researchers said, and no group has seen a bigger increase than black men. As a result, the overdose rate for black men has surpassed that of white men and is now on par with American Indian or Alaska Native men as the demographic groups most likely to die from overdoses.

There were 54.1 fatal drug overdoses for every 100,000 black men in the US in 2020. That was similar to the rate among American Indian or Alaska Native men (52.1 deaths per 100,000 people) and well above the rates among white men (44.2 per 100,000) and Hispanic men (27.3 per 100,000). The overdose death rate among men was lowest among Asians or Pacific Islanders (8.5 per 100,000).

There were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5 percent from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before, according to data from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.

The drug overdose death rate also has risen sharply among black women — 144 percent between 2015 and 2020, far outpacing the percentage increases among women in every other racial or ethnic group during the same period, according to the CDC.

Even as overdose deaths have soared, public concern in the US about drug addiction has decreased, according to Pew Research Center surveys. In early 2018, 42 percent of US adults said drug addiction was a major problem in their community, but that declined to 35 percent in October 2021.