An overlooked opioid crisis

Hi there,

We’re here with a special edition of The 51st. Today, we published reporting which found that older Black men in D.C. are dying of opioid overdoses at a dramatically disproportionate rate — not only compared to the rest of the city, but to any other group across the country.

New data, reported for the first time by The 51st, finds that Black men in their mid-fifties to mid-seventies accounted for nearly 38% of the city’s opioid fatalities in 2022, while only making up about 4% of D.C.’s total population. This disparity is the worst of any jurisdiction in the national data analysis.  

While we have long known these men are disproportionately impacted by the city’s opioid crisis, this new analysis places D.C. in an illuminating and underreported national context. 

We have this information thanks to an innovative partnership between The New York Times, The Baltimore Banner, and Stanford University’s Big Local News, which analyzed millions of death records. Our story today is running alongside reporting from six other local newsrooms across the U.S. investigating the impact opioids have had on this generation of men in their cities. 

Ambitious stories like these are what we sought to do when we formed The 51st. To support this type of journalism, become a member today. Scroll on to read an excerpt from our piece. You can find the whole story on our website.

Opioids are killing older Black men in D.C. at some of the highest rates in the country

Almost three decades had passed since 78-year-old Lance Ward last used heroin, but depression had deepened in his old age. While he’d been out for about seven years, decades of incarceration — and the drug deals and armed robberies that landed him there — cast a heavy shadow. Plus, even after all this time, the cravings still haunted him.

When Ward settled into the passenger seat of an old friend’s car on the D.C.-Maryland border earlier this year, it didn’t seem like a high-stakes decision to use again — he was just looking for a little relief. He’d heard rumors about fentanyl, a synthetic opioid magnitudes stronger than heroin that had overtaken the drug supply in recent years, but he was a veteran drug user. In his heyday, Ward says he routinely used an uncut heroin that he would’ve diluted 15 or 20 times before dealing it.

“I used the pure version of it, so I never thought that some of this stuff that’s out here now could hurt,” says Ward. “Guys who came up like I did in the heroin days — ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s — that drug made you feel good, and when you come out of prison, you think it’ll make you feel good again.”

The next thing Ward remembers is waking up in a hospital bed, surrounded by a frenzy of blue-uniformed medical workers scrambling to save his life. He had overdosed on a single hit. If not for his friend slamming on the gas and rushing him to the hospital, it’s unlikely he would have survived.

“All it takes is one mistake, that’s all it takes,” says Ward of using heroin today – which in many cases means using fentanyl, intentionally or not. Fentanyl has become so ubiquitous in drug supplies that in 2023, it contributed to 96% of D.C.’s fatal overdoses.

Ward survived his overdose, but many of his contemporaries haven’t been as lucky. Black men in their mid-fifties to mid-seventies are dying of opioid overdoses at a higher rate than anyone else in the city and — according to a new national analysis — more than anyone else in the country. 

Between 2018 and 2022, D.C. saw 2,289 of these men die of overdoses. According to a data analysis by the Baltimore Banner, The New York Times, and Big Local News, Black men born between 1951 and 1970 accounted for nearly 38% of the city’s opioid fatalities in 2022, while only making up about 4% of D.C.’s total population. This disparity is worse than in any other jurisdiction in the data analysis. For context, Baltimore, which has the highest overdose death rate of any major American city in U.S. history, has a smaller overdose death disparity among this cohort.

The problem for these men spans decades. Many of the men overdosing now were longtime heroin users who suffered the worst of D.C.’s heroin epidemic in the ‘60s and ‘70s. While the media coverage around opioids — and accountability for the pharmaceutical companies that kicked off an addiction crisis among largely white prescription pill users — has spurred federal action and attitude shifts, the realities for older Black men continue to go largely unaddressed.