Fentanyl Cuts a Bitter Swath Through Milwaukee

MILWAUKEE — Glenda O. Hampton doesn’t need to look far to witness the devastation of the fentanyl epidemic in her neighborhood on Milwaukee’s north side. She has found men lying on the curb, barely conscious, their legs splaying into the street as cars whiz by. She can count at least three people in recent months who sought treatment at the storefront rehabilitation center she runs, then relapsed and died from using fentanyl.

The synthetic opioid fentanyl has swept across the United States in recent years, the latest wave of a drug crisis that began with opioid painkillers and was followed by heroin. Fentanyl is a startlingly potent drug, 100 times more powerful than morphine, that was linked to the deaths of more than 70,000 Americans in 2021. They included first-time users who ingested more fentanyl than their bodies could handle, unsuspecting college students taking party drugs like cocaine that were laced with fentanyl, and people with longstanding addictions searching for cheap and plentiful highs.

In cities like Milwaukee, fentanyl is increasingly a crisis in heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods. It is spreading within communities that are already straining under the weight of poverty, disinvestment and violent crime, and are now struggling to control a drug whose reach grows every year.

A federal report released in July said that drug overdose deaths in the United States — which are largely driven by fentanyl — hit people of color the hardest, with rates among young Black people during the coronavirus pandemic rising the most sharply. Data from Milwaukee County showed that from 2020 to 2021, fatal overdoses increased by 6 percent among white people, but 55 percent among Black people.