Overdose deaths decreased in Philadelphia in 2023, but racial disparities persist
Between 2019 and 2023, overdose deaths increased by 61% among Black people and by 17% among Hispanic people in the city.
Drug overdose deaths decreased by 7% in 2023 in Philadelphia, but the death toll — 1,310 fatalities — was still the second-highest ever recorded in the city.
Health officials, releasing the latest official numbers Tuesday, said increasing racial disparities in the ongoing crisis tempered improvements in the overall death toll.
Between 2019 and 2023, overdose deaths increased by 61% among Black people and by 17% among Hispanic people in the city. Deaths among white people decreased by 19% in the same time period.
While the city does not yet have a final count of overdoses for 2024, Pew’s State of the City report, released last week, estimated that about 1,100 people died of overdoses in Philadelphia last year, which would represent about a 16% decrease from 2023.
“We’re really pleased with the decrease in overdose numbers in the city of Philadelphia, but we also know that this is not a time to celebrate,” said Keli McLoyd, the director of the city’s overdose response unit.
“We know that every single life that is lost to overdose is preventable, and it’s absolutely tragic when we lose any lives,” McLoyd said.
The relative improvements in the death rate in 2023 were also not equally distributed among racial groups.
Between 2022 and 2023, deaths decreased by only 5% among Black people, and by 15% among white people. Hispanic people saw a 2% increase in deaths.
And older Black men are increasingly bearing the brunt of the crisis. Black men saw the highest number of overdose deaths in the city in 2023, and the median age of victims was 52.
Treatment access helping
City officials credited the drop in deaths in part to increased efforts to distribute the opioid overdose-reversing drug naloxone. The city health department nearly doubled naloxone distribution in 2023, giving out more than 104,000 doses around the city.
Canvassers have knocked on 200,000 doors in some of the hardest-hit areas in the city since October 2023, including majority-Black neighborhoods that have seen sharp rises in overdoses in recent years. They have spoken with 17,000 residents about preventing overdoses and handed out 32,000 doses of naloxone, McLoyd said.
Health officials also noted steady increases in prescriptions for the opioid addiction treatment drug buprenorphine and efforts to treat more people with wounds from xylazine, an animal tranquilizer added to most illicit opioids in Philadelphia.
“I think we’ve seen a lot of change over the last five years with access to that type of care, and that is very likely contributing to this decrease,” said Daniel Teixeira da Silva, the medical director of the city health department’s division of substance use prevention and harm reduction.
Many addiction treatment facilities cannot also treat xylazine wounds, but a new program that connects people with wounds to specialized addiction treatment has served more than 400 people in the last two years, said Amanda David, the interim deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services.
Rising deaths with stimulant use
Health officials also noted a rise in stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine involved in fatal overdoses. While the vast majority of overdose deaths in the city involved an opioid, usually the synthetic opioid fentanyl, stimulants were involved in 70% of overdose deaths, up from 62% in 2019.
About three in four stimulant-related overdose deaths also involved an opioid, health officials said.
There are also racial disparities in stimulant-related overdose deaths.
Deaths involving opioids and stimulants more than doubled among Black people and increased by 40% among Hispanic people between 2019 and 2023.
Meanwhile, opioid-stimulant deaths among white people decreased by 17%.