Nearly 92,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020, marking a 30% increase from the year before, a 75% increase over five years and by far the highest annual total on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Preliminary figures suggest that the 2021 death toll from overdoses may be even higher.
While overdose death rates have increased in every major demographic group in recent years, no group has seen a bigger increase than Black men. As a result, Black men have overtaken American Indian or Alaska Native men and White men as the demographic group most likely to die from overdoses.
This Pew Research Center analysis examines how drug overdose death rates in the United States differ by gender, race and ethnicity. It is based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Drug overdose death rates for all racial and ethnic groups come from the CDC WONDER database – specifically, the database showing underlying causes of death by bridged-race categories for the years 1999 through 2020. Bridged-race categories include people of one race, as well as those who are multiracial. For those who are multiracial, the CDC selects a single race to allow for consistent comparisons. Read more about bridged-race categories here. Pew Research Center relied on the CDC’s bridged-race database instead of the single-race database to examine how drug overdose death rates changed over the 2015-2020 period; the single-race database covers only the 2018-2020 period.
In this analysis, all racial groups refer to non-Hispanic members of those groups, while Hispanics are of any race. All death rates are adjusted to account for age differences between U.S. demographic groups.
The public opinion data cited here comes from a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2021 among 9,676 U.S. adults. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that…