She said she does this because of a lack of awareness, driven partly by historic healthcare disparities experienced by racial and ethnic minority groups.Įven marketing campaigns made to bring awareness to the opioid crisis had not included the experience of black Americans, she said. She had been doing outreach work with A1 Stigma Free, a grassroots organisation founded just eight months ago to tackle a notable rise of overdose deaths within the African-American community in Cincinnati.Īs part of her work, Watts-Pearson frequently visited barbershops, bars and grocery stores to talk to people about the deadly impacts of fentanyl. Her study, however, revealed that African Americans were dying from a combination of fentanyl and other drug use at higher rates, across age groups and geographical lines.įor Rasheeda Watts-Pearson, an Ohio-based harm reduction specialist, the data reflected what she had seen in her region.
The opioid crisis had been traditionally portrayed as a "white problem", Prof Shover said.
With the arrival of fentanyl, drug use in those areas had become more lethal.
These states have historically high rates of drug use, Prof Shover said. It was also highly addictive, meaning people who struggled with substance use and were exposed to it often sought it out to avoid painful withdrawals.Īcross the US, the study identified states like Alaska, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Hawaii and California as having the highest rates of overdose deaths involving fentanyl and another drug. But the synthetic opiate became widely available as it was cheaper to produce compared to other drugs. When fentanyl first arrived in the US as part of the illegal drug supply, "a lot of people did not want it", Prof Shover said. "It's no surprise to me that we're seeing such an increase in stimulant-opioid combinations," Blake told the BBC.Īn alert on fentanyl being handed out in New York city in August 2017. She learned that many use fentanyl along with another stimulant for a prolonged high. This trend was being observed across the US, albeit in different ways owing to drug use patterns that differed from region to region.įor example, researchers found higher death rates related to the use of fentanyl and cocaine in north-eastern US states, like Vermont and Connecticut, where cocaine had traditionally been more available.īut for virtually everywhere else in the country, from West Virginia to California, deaths were primarily driven by the use of both methamphetamines and fentanyl.īlake, who is also a trained physician, said her son sporadically used cocaine, though his toxicology report revealed only fentanyl in his system. In their study, the researchers sounded the alarm on another growing trend: deaths related to the use of fentanyl and another stimulant drug, like cocaine or methamphetamine. "In 2018, around 80 percent of fentanyl overdoses happened east of the Mississippi river," Chelsea Shover, an assistant professor at UCLA's school of medicine and co-author of the study, told the BBC.īut in 2019, "fentanyl becomes part of the drug supply in the Western US, and suddenly this population that had been insulated from it is exposed, and death rates start to go up," Prof Shover said. Since then, the drug had spread across the US and death rates had grown sharply. The rise in fentanyl-related deaths was first observed in 2015, the data showed.
Virtually every corner of the US, from Hawaii to Alaska to Rhode Island, has been touched by fentanyl. "The rise of illicitly manufactured fentanyl has ushered in an overdose crisis in the United States of unprecedented magnitude," the study's authors wrote. The data paints a clear picture of how fentanyl redefined drug overdoses in America over the last decade. A chart showing how fentanyl is a growing problem in the US, accounting for more and more overdose deaths over the years.
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