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It is no longer news that we now have epidemic level-number proportions of opioid-related deaths in the US. The death rate has not in anyway slowed down despite the declaration of an epidemic about the situation since 2015 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as more than 29,000 deaths have been recorded in relation to opioids.

The bad thing is, no part of the US is left out of the condition. The high number of deaths has brought about different initiatives by local, state and federal government to help in fixing the epidemic. Even president Trump recently declared that the opioid situation is a nationwide health emergency.

It is important that we keep two facts at the back of our minds. One is, not all drug overdose cases are from opioids and while it may be true that about two-thirds of the deaths are from opioids, the other third of the count are during to other drugs. Second is that, we need to consider that there is a considerable difference in the experience between both men and women and different ethnic and racial groups despite the efforts made to reduce racial and gender inequalities in the country.

By paying attention to the fact that opioids aren't the only cause of overdose death and that inequality still abounds in our great country, we will come to the realization that the opioid problem isn't the same for everybody.

A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine broke up the data based on race and gender separating the black, Hispanic and non-Hispanic white people into separate groups. The result from the study are quite enlightening.

While there was an increase in the death rate across all groups, the increase was most evident in older black men and women aged 50 and 45 respectively. It was also shown that opioids was responsible for most deaths in white people but cocaine contributed most to the deaths of the black people. It showed that deaths that had to do with cocaine were more common in black men just as deaths from semisynthetic and natural opioids were common in white men from 2012 to 2017.

The rates remained generally lower overall for both whites and blacks for Hispanic people. But a large spike in deaths related to heroine were observed from 2012 to 2017 in both sexes. The study also showed that the death rate for white females seems to be shifting towards the older age while it is lower for the while males.

It is vital to be conscious of the fact that the authors of the study did not at any point separate deaths due to opioids into different categories like methadone, heroin, synthetic opioids and natural or semisynthetic opioids. When all those are added together, it is possible to see that they are still very much the main cause of death among all sexes and ages.

Nonetheless, looking at these trends may also help is better plan interventions for the situation. The extra attention given to opioids while neglecting the effects of cocaine as a major cause of death among the black community could lead to more inequality in the trend of deaths due to overdose. The message and care to be delivered when increasing resources in a targeted fashion or developing public service campaigns will usually depend on the age of the person in question. Again, while the rates of deaths caused by death are lower among the Hispanic people, the deaths are still to high and are quite significant and this makes a case for interventions that are culturally appropriate.

Analysis done not so long ago have shown that the response to the opioid problem has changed since when it became more of a "white problem". Of which, drug addiction problems were regarded with stigmatization and handled with criminalization in the past.

Now that it's more of a "white" problem, there is an "appropriate" call for more gentle war on drugs that recognize drug addiction is a medical condition and has to be treated like any other serious disease. We will be able to avoid a "one size fits all" general approach if we now accept that the epidemic affects different groups of people in different ways so that we can work well together to get a solution to the problem.