{"id":401543,"date":"2019-03-27T22:29:15","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T21:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-opioid-crisis-isnt-white\/"},"modified":"2019-03-27T22:29:15","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T21:29:15","slug":"the-opioid-crisis-isnt-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-opioid-crisis-isnt-white\/","title":{"rendered":"The Opioid Crisis Isn’t White"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

AMY<\/span> <\/span>GOODMAN<\/span>:<\/strong> <\/span>This is <\/span>Democracy Now!<\/em>, democracynow.org, <\/span>The War and Peace Report<\/em>. I\u2019m Amy Goodman. We\u2019re spending the hour on the opioid crisis. Right now we\u2019re joined by Abdullah Shihipar, who wrote a <\/span>New York Times<\/em> <\/span>op-ed<\/a> <\/span>last month headlined \u201cThe Opioid Crisis Isn\u2019t White.\u201d Abdullah, explain.<\/p>\n

ABDULLAH<\/span> <\/span>SHIHIPAR<\/span>:<\/strong> <\/span>Yeah. So, the opioid crisis traditionally is considered to be white, because people are looking at, largely, the total numbers, which no one would deny that mostly white Americans are dying of overdose from opioids. It\u2019s about 78 percent. But especially in the last few years, if you look at the rates of increase of opioid overdose death rates, we find that especially black Americans have had a stark increase in the death rates compared to other groups \u2014 in fact, more than white Americans. Since 2015, if you compare the rates of increase from 2015 to 2017, it\u2019s almost doubled. So, essentially, the opioid crisis, we tend to look at it as a white problem, but when you scratch beneath the service, you can really see that it affects the cross-sections of America.<\/p>\n

AMY<\/span> <\/span>GOODMAN<\/span>:<\/strong> <\/span>Can you talk about what you think accounts for the increase in addiction in the black and Latino communities?<\/p>\n

ABDULLAH<\/span> <\/span>SHIHIPAR<\/span>:<\/strong> <\/span>Right. So, we definitely know that fentanyl is a part of it. The <\/span>CDC<\/span> <\/span>just released a report documenting fentanyl-related overdoses, which showed that black Americans and Hispanic Americans showed a sharper rate of increase in fentanyl-related overdoses compared to white Americans. Now, that said, that\u2019s all we really know about it. We don\u2019t really know too, too much about why all of a sudden black and Hispanic Americans are overdosing at greater rates than white Americans at the moment. But fentanyl is definitely a part of that. But we don\u2019t know specifically.<\/p>\n

AMY<\/span> <\/span>GOODMAN<\/span>:<\/strong> <\/span>You know, for a long time there was criticism that for the drug epidemic in this country, it was not taken seriously in any national way, it was simply criminalized, not made a…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I\u2019m Amy Goodman. We\u2019re spending the hour on the opioid crisis. Right now we\u2019re joined by Abdullah Shihipar, who wrote a New York Times op-ed last month headlined \u201cThe Opioid Crisis Isn\u2019t White.\u201d Abdullah, explain. ABDULLAH SHIHIPAR: Yeah. So, the opioid crisis traditionally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-401543","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}