Larnell Robinson sat at a desk in his cluttered office last September, between a bookshelf full of Bibles and a table stacked with the overdose antidote Narcan. He slid out a list of residents of the West Baltimore high-rise where he was tenant council president — one of dozens of subsidized complexes that house the city’s poor seniors. One by one, he began scratching through names, conducting a grim accounting of the dead.
William, 63, killed by fentanyl and found in his ninth-floor unit in February 2023. Richard, 61, discovered in an apartment with multiple drugs in his system two and a half weeks later. David, 68, three days after that, also dead from fentanyl.
And then 59-year-old Glenn, who had lived on Mr. Robinson’s floor for years. Known for his willingness to run errands for others, he often biked to the store to get Mr. Robinson cigarettes. But after not seeing Glenn for a day, Mr. Robinson stuck a flier in his door. When it was still there the next morning, he summoned security.
This was one death, Mr. Robinson said later, that he couldn’t bear to witness. “I feel like I work at the morgue sometimes,” he said in an interview.
Over the past six years, as Baltimore has endured one of America’s deadliest drug epidemics, overdoses have fallen surprisingly hard on one group: Black men currently in their mid-50s to early 70s. While just 7 percent of the city’s population, they account for nearly 30 percent of drug fatalities — a death rate 20 times that of the rest of the country.
Black men of that age in the city are more likely to die of overdoses than cancer or Covid at the height of the pandemic; drugs are essentially tied with heart disease for their top killer. “I can’t think of another situation like this,” said Robert Anderson, chief of statistical analysis and surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those men were part of a little-recognized lost generation, their lives shaped by forces that have animated the city’s drug crisis for decades, according to an examination by The New York Times and The Baltimore Banner.
The story continues at The Baltimore Banner:
A horrific number of older Black men are dying from overdoses in Baltimore
This article was originally published by The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times.
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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.
