People in Baltimore have been dying of overdoses at a rate never before seen in a major American city.
The city was once hailed for its response to #addiction. But as #fentanyl flooded streets & ofcls shifted priorities, deaths hit unprecedented heights.
This is the first part in a series exploring #Baltimore’s overdose crisis.
In the past 6 yrs, nearly 6k lives have been lost. The death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly DOUBLE that of any other large city, & higher than nearly all of Appalachia during the prescription pill crisis, the Midwest during the height of rural meth labs or New York during the crack epidemic.
A decade ago, 700 fewer people here were being killed by drugs each year. And when fatalities began to rise from the synthetic #opioid#fentanyl, so potent that even minuscule doses are deadly, #Baltimore’s initial response was hailed as a national model. The city set ambitious goals, distributed #Narcan widely, experimented w/ways to steer people into treatment & ratcheted up campaigns to alert the public.