Drug addiction has plagued the Black community for decades, and with the rise of fentanyl in recent years, Black people should be on high alert — especially our Black men, whom statistics say are the most vulnerable.
In the height of the crack epidemic of the 1980s, young Black men fell victim to deadly overdoses at higher rates than any other ethnic group. Forty years later in 2024, the group with the highest fatal overdoses are these Black men. But although statistics note the difference in age range over time, a new study spearheaded by The New York Times found the dark shadow of drug overdoses particularly followed by a group of Black men throughout adulthood.
“Black men didn’t just start dying,” Mark Robinson, a 66-year-old D.C. native who runs a syringe exchange program told The Times. “We’ve been dying for decades as a direct result of opioid use disorder.”
Black men born from 1951-1970 experienced the crack-epidemic, the rise of heroin, and pills. Simultaneously, social and political struggles like mass incarceration, stop and frisk, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement have also shaped this generation and their relationship with society and drugs.
“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,” Tracie M. Gardner, the executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network, told The Times.
Fentanyl is about 50 times more potent than heroin, according to BBC. With the drug currently running rapid across the country, many users are dying from accidental overdoses involving the synthetic opioid. In 2022, 73,838 fentanyl-related deaths were reported, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is a drastic increase from previous years.
“If you were, in the past, using heroin, your chances of dying were much, much lower than your chances of dying now,” Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, said to The Times. “The key element now is the dangerousness of the drugs.”
According to The Times, the drug supply has become more dangerous than ever before. And in urban cities like Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., older Black men are at higher risk of falling victim to drug-related deaths.
Across 10 different urban cities, The Times found Black men ages 54 to 73 are dying from overdoses at over four times the rate of men of other races. But despite these alarming statistics, these Black men are typically forgotten by the healthcare system and, even shockingly, by the rehabilitation system.
These Black drug users are less likely than white drug users to receive notable prescription medicines for addiction treatment, The Times reported. On top of this, addiction outreach programs tend to cater to younger drug users.
“If you go to a harm reduction program, it’s not typically set up with older folks in mind,” said Brendan Saloner, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, who studies access to health care among people who use drugs. “They’re not in any way unwelcome, but they’re not generally the target.”
Curving the overdose epidemic, especially for older Black men, is not an easy feat, according to Dr. Volkow, the director of NIDA. “It will require coordinated work involving health service providers, community coalitions, policy makers, and—critically—people with lived and living experience of substance use,” she said.