Opioids Killing Young, White Suburban Americans More Than Anyone Else for 2nd Consecutive Year

The opioid crisis is killing young, white suburban Americans more than any other demographic in the United States for the second consecutive year.

A newly released report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that among all racial groups in large cities, suburbs, and small towns, young white Americans between 25 to 34 years old living in suburbs had the highest opioid-involved overdose deaths in 2017 at a rate of nearly 60 deaths per 100,000.

This is the second consecutive year that young white Americans in the suburbs have died at the highest rate for opioid-involved overdose deaths. In 2016, this demographic had an opioid overdose death rate of nearly 51 deaths per 100,000 — more than any other group of Americans.

In small towns across the U.S., white Americans between 25 to 34 years old and 35 to 44 years old have the highest opioid overdose death rates. In 2017, younger white millennials in small towns died at an opioid overdose rate of about 40.2 deaths per 100,000. Similarly, white Generation Xers in small towns died at an overdose rate of 38.3 deaths per 100,000.

Meanwhile, black Americans have the highest opioid overdose death rate in the nation’s largest cities and metropolises. In 2017, black Americans between 45 to 54 years old and 55 to 64 years old in large cities had an overdose death rate between about 41.9 to 42.7 deaths per 100,000 — a 96 to 117 percent increase since 2015.

As Breitbart News has chronicled, young white American men are dying the most from fentanyl, the deadly opioid by which one pound can kill more than 220,000 people. Between 2011 and 2016, fentanyl overdose deaths increased by more than 1,000 percent. In 2011, for example, there were about 1,660 Americans who died of fentanyl overdoses. Fast forward to 2016, and there were 18,335 Americans who died from fentanyl.

Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency seized enough fentanyl to kill nearly twice the U.S. population, Breitbart News reported. For the first time, Americans are now more likely to die from an accidental opioid overdose than from injuries in a car crash.

Drug overdoses in 2017 killed an unprecedented 72,287 U.S. residents, nearly three times the number of individuals killed by global terrorism and 10,000 more than the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Nearly 50,000 of those deadly overdoses were caused by either heroin or fentanyl.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 

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