Heroin laced with the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl has killed thousands of such drug users in the past several years, driving a largely overlooked urban public-health crisis. Since 2014, the national rate of fatal drug overdoses has increased more than twice as fast among African Americans as among whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In this new explosion of deaths, the nation’s capital is ground zero. The District saw 279 people die of opioid overdoses last year, a figure that surpassed the city’s homicides and was greater than three times the number of opioid deaths in 2014. More than 70 percent of cases involved fentanyl or its analogues, according to the District’s chief medical examiner, and more than 80 percent of victims were black.
Even in a country where opioids are killing people at unprecedented rates, the District stood out. Between 2014 and 2017, the city’s rate of fatal drug overdoses rose by 209.9 percent — an increase higher than that in any state and the ninth-highest among all U.S. counties, CDC data show. (The agency does not track overdoses by city.)