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).

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