In pandemic, drug overdose deaths soar among Black Americans

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“I’m tired of going to family funerals,” says an activist who passes out the overdose-reversal medication Narcan in Black communities. He lost three relatives as overdose deaths surged among Black Americans during the COVID pandemic.

https://apnews.com/article/george-floyd-michael-brown-pandemics-coronavirus-pandemic-race-and-ethnicity-ea94f4021018bfc7bc88e7b494c8665e

It was September, and as the COVID-19 pandemic intensified America’s opioid addiction crisis in nearly every corner of the country, many Black neighborhoods like this one suffered most acutely. The portrait of the opioid epidemic has long been painted as a rural white affliction, but the demographics have been shifting for years as deaths surged among Black Americans.

“That incident on top of the pandemic rocked the boat and shook all of us. It ripped the Band-Aid off a wound that has always been there,” said Turner, who grew in the same neighborhoods where Elazer lived, beset by addiction, poverty and one of the highest murder rates in America. “We’re undoing history of damage, history of trauma, history of racism.”Pastors are now marching into the city jail to train inmates how to survive once they get outside.

Addiction was not widely accepted as a public health crisis — with a focus on treatment instead of incarceration — until recent years, only once it started killing white teens in the suburbs, Barr said. A lot of illicit fentanyl is manufactured in Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 was first unleashed. Lockdowns initially disrupted the supply, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institute fellow who studies trafficking.

In St. Louis, fentanyl flooded back to the streets. The death count exploded early last summer, said Rachel Winograd, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who tracks the state’s overdose data. In the first six months of 2020, deaths increased 64% among Black people from the same period the year before, and 40% among white people.

One day last summer in St. Louis, Lynda Brooks went into a bathroom to smoke what she thought was crack. She felt strange, sat down and remembers only darkness. Once she was revived from a fentanyl overdose, she wondered if she’d been in hell.Brooks, a 55-year-old grandmother, had been addicted to crack for decades. She was often homeless and life out there was hard. She was assaulted, spit on, her husband died. So she took more drugs to escape feeling sad or scared or worthless.

 

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Ban illegal drugs

This is why, DO not vote a Democrat into office, once in office They do not care about you until the next election rolls around

Get rid of the dealers. Problem solved.

well buying opioid's on the street will kill ye, sadly

They could just not take the drugs in the first place.

And drug legalization would be good for the Country?

😢

The Sackler family needs to be sued into abject poverty.

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In pandemic, drug overdose deaths soar among Black AmericansST. LOUIS (AP) — She screamed and cried, banged on the dashboard, begging her husband to drive faster, faster, faster toward her brother lying face-down on his bedroom floor. Craig Elazer had struggled all his life with anxiety so bad his whole body would shake. It's no more a race issue than it is a gender issue; men die from overdosing at 2-3x the rate of women. Prohibition kills. The drugs that people want are much more safe than the only drugs they have available to them under prohibition. DRUG ADDICTION has long been overlooked in the homeless population. Oddly, the majority of the homeless people we encounter on the streets of sunny California are not Black, Brown, Yellow or Red…they’re White. Our tax laden system is failing Us all. The Blame Game! In syndication longer than Jeopardy! Fix yourself people. No one cares about you. 'Society' isn't real. It's just a convenient excuse for people who have accepted they are lazy or unlucky. Be less lazy and be less unlucky.
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