But the opioid epidemic is not entirely white — and it’s a mistake to characterize it that way, given how opioids are harming nonwhite communities.

According to statistics collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation, black people made up 12 percent of all opioid-related fatal overdose victims in 2017, with 5,513 deaths, more than double the number in 2015. (Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 78 percent of all victims — 37,113 deaths in total, a 37 percent increase from 2015 — and Hispanics 8 percent.)

Twelve percent may not seem like a lot, but it is roughly proportional to the number of African-Americans in the United States population as a whole. In some areas, most victims of fatal overdoses are black, as in the District of Columbia, where black people make up more than 80 percent of opioid-related deaths. In Massachusetts, meanwhile, opioid death rates are going down for all other groups, but continue to rise for black people.

Dr. Tom Gilson, a medical examiner in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, told the Boston NPR affiliate WBUR that there was a “Fourteen-fold increase in fentanyl deaths among African-Americans” in three years; most of those deaths involved fentanyl mixed with cocaine. A recent study found that between 2012 and 2015, black men died from cocaine overdose at rates as high as white men who died from opioids during that period. If fentanyl-laced cocaine becomes more common, overdoses among black Americans could get much worse.

Native Americans have also been hit hard by the opioid crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2015 Native Americans had the largest increase in overdose deaths compared to other groups. The C.D.C. also reported that in 2016, rates of prescription-opioid-related overdose were higher among both non-Hispanic whites and Native Americans than other groups. In response to this, several Native American tribes have filed lawsuits against the manufacturers and distributors of prescription opioids.