The number of African-Americans in the District of Columbia who died of opioid overdoses more than tripled between 2014 and 2017, according to numbers from the district's Office of the Medical Examiner cited by NPR.
From 2014 to 2017, the number of African-Americans in Washington, D.C., who died of an opioid overdose increased from 60 to 207. The 207 deaths represent 80 percent of all opioid overdose deaths reported in the District in 2017.
"It's a frightening time," Edwin Chapman, MD, a Washington, D.C.-based internal medicine physician who specializes in drug addiction, told NPR. "[T]he urban African-American community is dying now at a faster rate than the epidemic in the suburbs and rural areas."
In 2016, the drug death rate among African-Americans in urban counties rose by 41 percent nationally, according to numbers from the CDC. The drug largely attributable to this rise is fentanyl, according to Melissa Clarke, MD, an emergency physician who works with Dr. Chapman in the district. Fentanyl is an extremely potent synthetic opioid, which is often laced into heroin and other street drugs, increasing the drugs' lethality.
"African-Americans are falling victim to fentanyl and carfentanyl [sic] because they are so much more potent than heroin," said Dr. Clarke, according to NPR. "People who've even been life-long heroin users are dying because they don't understand how to titrate those doses. We feel like we have a fire underneath us — people are dying every day."
To read the full report from NPR, click here.
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