Black Women Rising, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and local clergy and public health leaders hosted a day-long summit on May 17 in order to address the racial divide in the current drug overdose crisis.
The Harm Reduction: Harm to Healing Summit’s goal was to investigate how the false narrative that opioid addiction is a “whites only” medical epidemic impacts resources, treatment and stigma, while continuing to exacerbate racial disparities and barriers. Despite persistent assumptions that rates of opioid use, addiction and deaths are limited primarily to white Americans, data show that in 2017 the combined rate of opioid abuses among blacks and Latinos in Ohio resembles that of white Americans.
