For years, discussions about America's substance-abuse crisis have focused almost exclusively on the narrative that it is white, middle-age adults who face the greatest risk of dying from drug overdoses, alcoholic liver disease and suicide. But after roughly a decade, researchers at UCLA and elsewhere have begun to dismantle this idea. In a study published recently in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, authors found that deaths of despair rates for middle-age Black and Native Americans have surged past those of white Americans as the overdose crisis moves from being driven by prescription opioids to illegal drugs such as fentanyl and heroin. While the opioid crisis did raise drug overdose deaths among white Americans for a time, it was an anomaly,