This CDC webpage discusses the most recent federal effort to reduce opioid overdoses, the Opioid Rapid Response Program (ORRP), established in 2020. The program aims to increase communication between federal authorities, local law enforcement, state health agencies, and healthcare resources in an effort to reduce overdose risk. While goals include increasing access to behavioral and mental health care, the ORRP has prioritized creating safer access to prescription opioids for chronic pain sufferers and those already addicted to opioids. Since its inception, ORRP has increased local alerts on prescription drug disruptions, which allow resources to be redirected to communities that may lose safe access to drugs, in order to reduce the risk of users turning to unsafe drugs like fentanyl.
This study, published in early 2020, shows that opioid overdoses disproportionately affected people between the ages of 10 and 59 in White, American Indian / Alaskan Native, and Hispanic populations. Other identity components were also identified as risk factors, such as being male, having a disability, not being college educated, being a U.S. citizen, renting your home, living in urban areas, not having health insurance, living below the poverty line, being incarcerated, and living in South Atlantic or Mountains states. This study is useful for considering socioeconomic factors that increase individuals' risk for drug abuse and overdose; however, because it was published before the COVID-19 pandemic, its ability to explain the socioeconomic factors that impacted the spiking rates of overdoses post-2020 are limited.
This chapter gives a basic, but useful, introduction to Critical Race Theory (CRT). The article traces CRT's history to previous critical movements such as legal theory and radical feminism, highlighting race as a social construct by which some are granted privileges and others are marginalized. This chapter has been helpful in building our project's theoretical framework, especially in regard to considering race as a variable in fatal overdose risk.
This is the source of our dataset for this project. It contains data about U.S. drug overdoses from 1999 to 2022, with demographic information such as gender and race, as well as information on drug type (ie. opioids vs. stimulants). The article also includes numerous visualizations that help illustrate the change in overdose rates across different age groups, genders, and drug types. The data shows a strong trend of increasing overdoses due to opioids (primarily fentanyl) being found in or consumed with non-opioid drugs. Missing from this article, however, are visualizations about how racial groups are differentially impacted by drug abuse—this is where our attention has turned for our project.
This timeline emphasizes the racist and prejudiced past of America's War on Drugs. Importantly, it shows that the first drug law in the U.S. aimed to regulate opium smoking dens, which were primarily found in Chinese immigrant communities. We used this source to help build our deadline.
This article discusses strategies for addressing opioid overdoses, such as regulating drug supply, increasing access to treatment, changing prescription habits, educating patients, and implementing harm reduction programs.
This article discusses a new study, conducted by researchers at Brown University, that shows a correlation between police drug seizures and fatal drug overdoses in the following weeks. Researchers hypothesize that the correlation is related to the seizures causing users to seek out new and potentially untrustworthy sources, which may contain more dangerous substances, such as fentanyl. The study authors highlight the importance of increasing harm-reduction protocols, rather than increasing surveillance and seizures, which may cause more deaths. This article is relevant to our project because overdose data has historically used to increase policing in certain communities, which could ultimately be more detrimental than beneficial. Acknowledging this truth is crucial to rethinking our response to the current overdose epidemic.
This timeline provides incredibly crucial context to the history of America's War on Drugs. This is helpful in general for understanding the historical background of this project. Importantly, the authors also show how the War on Drugs had racist intentions and how racism shapes the demographics of who is arrested for drug possession, use, and sale.
This article argues that criminalization of drugs and punitive policies have led to increased overdose death rates. Kachalia cites the racist and xenophobic history of drug laws dating back to the 1800s, tracing drug laws to governmental efforts to criminalize Black people, immigrants, and protestors. She criticizes New Jersey's large budget spent on policing and incarcerating drug users, and argues that such funds would be better spent on increasing community-based resources and harm reduction protocols. Reacting to a recently introduced piece of New Jersey legislation that aims to penalize fentanyl use and sale, Kachalia argues instead that all drugs must be decriminalized in order to reduce overdose deaths.
This study analyzed data from the State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS) for 25 states and Washington D.C. over the years 2019 to 2020. The study found that overdose rates increased 44% over the year in Black populations, and 39% over the year in American Indian / Alaskan Native populations. Additionally, the study found that in areas where income disparity was greater, the rate of overdose deaths was also greater. This study is important for us to consider, because it shows how an entire community's status, as opposed to just an individual's identity factors, may increase risk for fatal overdose.
Lopez's article suggests a number of strategies to decrease opioid overdoses, which include: 1) reducing the drug supply, 2) increasing access to improved addiction treatment, 3) focusing on harm reduction by providing clean needles and naloxone, 4) reducing negative life factors that may be contributing to drug abuse. While this article offers some good potential solutions, it is important to recognize that some of these solutions suggest increased policing, which other studies show may be more detrimental than beneficial. More radical solutions, such as decriminalizing drugs and reducing police surveillance have been suggested by other sources that we came across in our research.
This study surveyed 248 officers from 27 police departments in Illinois and found that officers held a mean score of 4 on a scale of 1 (non-stigmatizing) to 6 (very stigmatizing) for stigma against people who use drugs. Officer demographics were found to have a statistically significant impact on officer beliefs; officers with higher levels of education were more likely to blame drug users for their addiction, while officers with lower levels of education we more likely to believe that drug users would be prone to lying. Additionally, officers with longer policing careers were more likely to blame users for their addiction than newer officers. Study authors suggest that prevailing stigmatizing views among police offices about opioid usage may negatively impact programs aimed at reducing drug abuse-related harm and fatality.
Risam's article includes a thoughtful consideration of how the lens of intersectional theory can contribute to the field of the digital humanities (DH). Risam argues for intersectionality as methodology, bridging the age-old debate of theory vs. praxis. She exhorts DHers to consider in their practice, how their projects and tools can incorporate intersectional perspectives into their design and underlying theoretical approaches. This reading is helpful to us in considering how we can build this project in a way that considers multiple axes of power, while also trying to produce a universally accessible product.
In this response to Julie Avril Minich, Sami Schalk argues for the reconceptualization of (dis)ability as an axis of identity, akin to ethnicity or gender. She discusses how this new terminology and the framework of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) can help illuminate the ways in which society labels certain bodies "able," and others "disabled." CDS can therefore be used to critically examine how (dis)ability intersects with other axes of identity and power, shaping our world and choosing who is marginalized and excluded. Schalk's reading is central to our project because CDS provides a critical lens to understand how drug addiction is pathologized and stigmatized by society.
This article discusses how COVID-19 seems to have played a role in shifting the demographics of fatal opioid overdose. While young white people used to be at higher risk for fatal overdose, now older Black people, especially those in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, are statistically more likely to die of opioid overdose. The article attributes these shifts in part to increasing cocaine consumption, which causes accidental opioid overdose due to unknown amounts of opioids hidden within cocaine. Researchers also believe that these increases are related to the pandemic, but they do not know the specific ways in which the pandemic caused or is correlated with this demographic shift.
This Youtube video discusses the historic rise of drug overdoes, focusing especially on the rise of opioid-related overdose after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The video notes how the increase of synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, have increased the rates of unintentional deaths. This is due to the fact that fentanyl is now found in street drugs that are sold under the guise of stimulants or other safer prescription opioids. This phenomenon is believed to be the cause of increased overdose rates in adolescents. The video discusses how anyone can recognize the signs of an opioid overdose; thus, the best way to combat the epidemic is for everyone to carry, and be trained to use, naloxone. In 2023, the overdose death rate dropped for the first time in 5 years, thanks to a decrease in fentanyl deaths—suggesting that increased efforts to provide naloxone have been making a huge difference.