Aaron Bolton reported for NPR out of Browning, Montana (population 1,018), a few days ago, "Tribal leaders sound the alarm after fentanyl overdoses spike at Blackfeet Nation." It's a now familiar and tragic tale of this potent synthetic opioid, told through a Native lens. Here's an excerpt:
During the pandemic, fentanyl took root in Montana and communities across the Mountain West region, says Keith Humphreys of the Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis. Previously, the drug was prevalent east of the Mississippi River.
Montana law enforcement officials have intercepted record numbers of pale blue pills made to look like prescription opioids such as OxyContin. In the first three months of 2022, the Montana Highway Patrol seized over 12,000 fentanyl pills, more than three times the number from 2021.
Nationwide, at least 103,000 people have died from drug overdoses in 2021, a 45% increase from 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 7 of every 10 of those deaths were from synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl.
Overdose deaths disproportionately affect Native Americans. The overdose death rate among Indigenous people was the highest of all racial groups in the first year of the pandemic — and was about 30% higher than the rate among white people, according to a March study published in JAMA Psychiatry, co-authored by Joe Friedman, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In Montana, the opioid overdose death rate for Indigenous people was twice that of white people from 2019 to 2021, according to the state's Department of Public Health and Human Services.
Part of the reason why this is happening is that Native Americans have relatively less access to health care resources, Friedman says.
Here are a number of other posts that mention the Blackfeet nation, including this one featuring photos I took there in 2011.
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