Urgent response: Nonprofit fights surge in fentanyl overdoses among U.S. Latinos

NEW YORK CITY - overdose deaths among Latinos almost tripled in the last decade, and a nonprofit devoted to addressing cases involving fentanyl launched a bilingual campaign aimed at raising awareness among members of the demographic this week.

La Nueva Drug Talk is an online platform launched by Song for Charlie and aimed at facilitating how parents, tutors or teachers can approach the subject with Latino teens and young people. It includes TikTok videos, prompts to talk about mental health, and practice scenarios to discuss drug use and overdoses among acquaintances.

The initiative also includes in-person sessions, initially in California and Washington D.C., to discuss these same issues.

"We want this to be taken to the dinner table, to be talked about personally and realistically," Renee Cuevas, a member of the team that developed the initiative, said. "It will take multiple conversations, but our hope is that we start things off and the info we've provided helps to make an impact."

Cuevas also points to the struggles many in her generation have navigated, such as educational disruptions and mental health impacts from the pandemic, as reasons why a program like this one is an important resource.

Overdose deaths among Latinos have nearly tripled since 2011, according to a report published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Despite these figures, there are few services modeled specifically for Latinos, such as bilingual rehabilitation centers or programs that account for cultural factors like a stigma around discussing mental health. This is why, according to the initiative's website, these are "the most urgent conversations we can have."

Latinos are being impacted more from the fentanyl crisis because a larger proportion of them live in cities like New York, San Diego and Los Angeles, where the opioid has penetrated more, whether on its own or mixed with other drugs, NBC News reported.

But smaller towns with sizable Latino populations are experiencing an alarming rise in opioid deaths as well. It was the case in Carrollton, Texas, which saw a spate in overdose deaths among teens as young as 14 in a town that is over 30% Latino.

Fentanyl isn't new, it has been used in the U.S. since 1960 as an intravenous anesthetic. It is still prescribed by doctors today, often in the form of patches and lozenges, for treating severe and chronic pain from cancer and other illnesses and injuries, Yale Medicine reports.

But fentanyl has shifted from exclusively being produced by pharmaceutical companies to now also coming from drug cartels and other entities, says Dr. David Fiellin, a Yale Medicine primary care physician who specializes in addiction medicine. "We refer to it as illicitly manufactured fentanyl,"

In 2022, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), around 83,000 people died from opioid overdoses in the U.S., the majority from fentanyl and other highly potent synthetic substances.