People in Baltimore have been dying of overdoses at a rate never before seen in a major American city.
In the past six years, nearly 6,000 lives have been lost. The death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly double that of any other large city, and 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 with ways to steer people into treatment and ratcheted up campaigns to alert the public.
But then city leaders became preoccupied with other crises, including gun violence and the pandemic. Many of those efforts to fight overdoses stalled, an examination by The New York Times and The Baltimore Banner has found.
The story continues at The Baltimore Banner: Almost 6,000 dead in 6 years: How Baltimore became the U.S. overdose capital
This article was originally published by The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times.
WYPR and The Baltimore Banner have a joint operating agreement that allows the nonprofit organizations to work collaboratively to deliver quality journalism across the region. To learn more about the partnership, click here.
About the series
The reporters examined the city’s response to rising overdose deaths as part of The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship. This is the first part in a series exploring Baltimore’s overdose crisis.
About the analysis
The Times and The Banner analyzed anonymized data about every death in the United States between 1989 and 2022 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data, obtained under an academic license through the reporter Nick Thieme’s affiliation with Columbia University, shows demographics and causes of death. Fatalities from 1968 through 1989 were collected from a separate data set the C.D.C. publishes.
Fatality rates in this article measure deaths that occurred in Baltimore, not deaths of Baltimore residents, and are calculated across the country by dividing the total number of overdose deaths that occurred in each jurisdiction by its population. For that reason, totals will differ from those in the C.D.C.’s online database, C.D.C. Wonder, which measures deaths by place of residence and also excludes deaths of people who live in U.S. territories or outside the United States.
The C.D.C. reports data by county, and the analysis identified large U.S. cities by looking at counties of at least 400,000 people. Baltimore City is reported as its own county. Overdose fatalities are those in which the underlying cause of death is listed as drug poisoning.
The Banner also sued the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to obtain autopsy data, which allowed reporters to explore detailed geographic patterns of overdose within the city.
Death rates are not calculated for U.S. territories or Washington, though rates for both are significantly lower than in Baltimore.
