Fentanyl, once known as a white suburban and rural youth problem stemming from “pill mills” of the southeast and midwest, has now morphed into an inner city Black men problem, where overdose deaths are rising faster than all other groups.
Early on in the epidemic, health providers generously blamed addiction in white communities on opioid mass production and easy access to pharmaceutical oxy. For Black people, use and death was labeled more as street level addiction and criminal, not clinical.
A familiar double standard…