In the United States, individuals who identify as Black or African American or Latino or Hispanic (Black and Latino hereafter) historically have had lower rates of opioid-involved deaths compared to those who identify as non-Latino Whites (Lippold et al., 2019). From 2015 to 2017, Blacks and Latinos faced the highest rates of increase in opioid-involved deaths, especially in large metropolitan areas (Black + 103%; Latino + 57%; White + 35%) (Lippold et al., 2019). Furthermore, rates of fentanyl-specific deaths have increased from 2011 to 2016 for Blacks (+140.6% per year) and for Latinos (+118.3% per year) (Spencer et al., 2019). Overall, synthetic opioids other than methadone have increasingly affected the death rate of Blacks and Latinos in the past few years (Wilson, 2020).
To read the full article click here.