Healthy is for the Wealthy –

July 1, 2020 – In recent years, the opioid overdose crisis ravaging Philadelphia has often been painted as affecting mostly white people. But even as overdose deaths slowly decrease among white Philadelphians, residents of color, and particularly Hispanic people, have been increasingly hard-hit by a rising death toll. The death rate among whites declined by 22% in 2018 and by 3% in 2019. But the Black overdose death rate dropped just 14% in 2018, and had bounced back up to its 2017 rate by 2019.

Overdose death rates among Hispanics dropped by 9% in 2018, and spiked by 24% in 2019 — bringing overdose death rates about even with that of whites.

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