Fentanyl is spreading the opioid crisis into America’s big cities

In a world where open data makes spreadsheets with tens of thousands of anonymised entries available to the public, sometimes individual detail can still stand out. On Christmas Day last year, according to data downloaded from the Cook County medical examiner, the coroner in Chicago and its closer suburbs, four people died from opioid overdoses. One, a 34-year-old man, had apparently been taking cocaine. Another, a 43-year-old, was suffering “complications of chronic ethanolism”. All four, however, were almost certainly killed by the first drug listed as cause of death: fentanyl. They were among exactly 2,000 people killed by opioid overdoses in Cook County last year, accounting for close to one in 20 of all deaths. Over the past eight years, the annual total has tripled. Nine in ten deaths involved fentanyl.