More young American whites dying of drug overdose

More young whites dying of drug overdose in US

Gina Kolata & Sarah Cohen | NYT News Service | Jan 18, 2016, 04.57 AM IST

Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the US to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.
   

The rising death rates for those young white adults, aged 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it. The Times analysed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non-Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 — a trend that was particularly pronounced in women — even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall.



While the death rate among young whites rose for every age group over the five years before 2014, it rose faster by any measure for the less educated, by 23% for those without a high school education, compared with only 4% for those with a college degree or more. The drug overdose numbers were stark. In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites aged 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999, and the rate for 35-to 44-year-old whites tripled during that period. The numbers cover both illegal and prescription drugs.

Rising rates of overdose deaths and suicide appear to have erased the benefits from advances in medical treatment for most age groups of whites. In fact, graphs of the drug overdose deaths look like those of deaths from a new infectious disease, said Jonathan Skinner, a Dartmouth economist. "It is like an infection model, diffusing out and catching more and more people."

Yet overdose deaths for young adult blacks have edged up only slightly. Over all, the death rate for blacks has been steadily falling, largely driven by a decline in deaths from AIDS.

"This is the smallest proportional and absolute gap in mortality between blacks and whites at these ages for more than a century," Dr. Skinner said. There is a reason that blacks appear to have been spared the worst of the narcotic epidemic, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a drug abuse expert. Studies have found that doctors are more reluctant to prescribe painkillers to minority patients, worrying that they might sell them or become addicted.

Researchers are struggling to come up with an answer to the question of why whites in particular are doing so poorly.

Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, said the causes of death in these younger people were largely social.