CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Purple flags, representing the nearly 300 Mecklenburg County residents who died of opioid overdose in 2023, fluttered in the humid breeze last August in recognition of International Overdose Awareness Day on the city’s predominantly Black west side.
As recently as five years ago, the event might have attracted an overwhelmingly white crowd.
But the gathering on the last day of the month at the Valerie C. Woodard Community Resource Center drew large attendance from Black people eager to learn more about a crisis that now has them at the center.
In recent years, the rate of overdose deaths from opioids — originally dubbed “Hillbilly heroin” because of their almost exclusive misuse by white people — has grown significantly among Black people. This is largely due to the introduction of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times as powerful as morphine, which is often mixed into heroin and cocaine supplies and can be consumed unknowingly. In North Carolina, Black people died from an overdose at the rate of 38.5 per 100,000 residents in 2021 — more than double the rate in 2019, according to North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services data.
Terica Carter, founder of Hajee House Harm Reduction, a Charlotte-based nonprofit that co-organized the event with the county’s public health office, has been working to change that statistic. Seven years ago, she founded Hajee House after the overdose death of her 18-year-old son, Tahajee, who took an unprescribed dose of Percocet that he didn’t know was laced with fentanyl. Her nonprofit has since focused on …