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Monday, January 18th, 2016

Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites

Author:     GINA KOLATA and SARAH COHEN
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     JAN. 16, 2016
 Link: Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites
Stephan:   We are experiencing a significant epidemic of drug deaths amongst young White adults.  This is a groundswell trend that has not been receiving the attention it deserves, and this is one of the first assessments of it that I have seen in corporate media. Note that it is particular to Whites. Why is this happening? I think because Blacks and Hispanics are used to living in a society that does not favor them, whereas in the new post middle-class America, young White adults  are experiencing such frustrations and tensions for the first time.
Credit: Sabphoto

Credit: Sabphoto

Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.

The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.

The Times analyzed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non-Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 — a trend that was particularly pronounced in women — even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall.

The analysis shows that […]

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