As The Banner embarked on months of reporting into Baltimore’s opioid epidemic in partnership with The New York Times, we were struck by one key finding in particular: Black men currently in their mid-50s to early 70s were dying at an alarming rate.

As it turns out, that finding wasn’t limited to Baltimore. Older Black men were an outlier in cities across the country, part of a little-recognized lost generation.

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Overdoses plague a generation of Black men in Baltimore and cities across America

In collaboration with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship and Stanford University’s Big Local News, The Banner spearheaded an effort to share our one-of-a-kind dataset with nine other newsrooms across the country.

Today, we’re proud to be publishing the third installment in our overdose series, which examines PHA Healthcare, a drug treatment company collecting millions in government funding even as many of its patients have relapsed, fallen deeper into addiction and, sometimes, died.

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We are also simultaneously publishing a national look at the crisis facing older Black men by The Times, along with regional reports by six of those newsrooms:

The Boston Globe, Wisconsin Watch and Free Press Indiana/Mirror Indy will publish stories in January.

To understand what was happening in Baltimore, The Banner spent more than a year analyzing overdose death rates in every other U.S. county. Armed with that data, we wanted to share the analysis with other newsrooms to report their own local versions of the Baltimore story, shedding a light on this important issue and, hopefully, sparking change that saves lives.

In Chicago, the conversation has already started.

“Being given the data that The Baltimore Banner developed made it possible to tell Chicago readers an important story about a long-term, societal problem. And, as a result of this reporting, officials are now talking about looking for ways to help this generation of Black men who for decades have been at high risk for dying from opioid overdoses,” said Chicago Sun-Times Deputy Managing Editor Paul Saltzman.

We hope other cities follow suit.