With drug death rate zooming among black men, DeWine wants action – News – Akron Beacon Journal

Alarmed that Ohio’s highest drug overdose death rate now belongs to black men, Gov. Mike DeWine is calling for increased efforts to battle addiction in the minority community.

DeWine on Thursday appointed a minority health working group to develop recommendations as part of his RecoveryOhio initiative to improve addiction and mental health treatment across the state.

“We need to ensure that we are serving all Ohioans with mental health and substance abuse disorder” regardless of race, DeWine said. “We need to take a hard look at how we deliver services.”

Dr. Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health, said new analysis of 2017 unintentional drug overdose deaths showed 449 non-Hispanic black men among the toll, a rate of 64.6 deaths per 100,000.

That number, for the first time at least in recent years, surpassed the rate of 63.7 deaths per 100,000 white non-Hispanic men (2,744 total deaths), who long had been the most susceptible to dying from drug overdoses, particularly from opioids such as fentanyl.

Black men were more prone to dying from cocaine, often mixed with fentanyl, than any other demographic group, she said.

The actual number of overdose deaths among black men jumped by 50 percent just from 2016 to 2017. The increase among white males was about 14 percent.

Cheri Walter, of the Ohio Association of County Behavioral Health Authorities, said when opioid deaths were largely tied to pill overdoses, it tended to impact mostly the white community. But now that fentanyl is being cut into cocaine and other street drugs, overdose deaths are spreading more into the minority community.

Overall, 4,854 people died of drug overdoses in Ohio in 2017, an increase of 804 deaths or 20 percent over 2016, according to state figures.

Recent federal figures showed that Ohio deaths between mid-2017 and mid-2018 decreased 21 percent, but state figures show the trend of a higher death rate among black men continued into 2018, Acton said.

Stephen Massey, a victim advocate with Citi Lookout in Springfield who will serve as a co-chair of the minority health working group, said it will work to develop recommendations to fix “gaps and disparities” in the availability of resources and treatment in minority communities, particularly in urban cores.

Saying drug addiction is “a disease that does not discriminate,” Dr. Mark Hurst, assistant director of the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, said the state must move toward “health equity” by removing barriers to treatment services.

The governor’s two-year state budget proposal calls for investing more than $200 million in additional funds across several agencies to address addiction and mental health needs.

Dispatch reporter Catherine Candisky contributed to this story.

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