A new neighborhood-level breakdown from the Wentworth County Department of Health shows Lowertown has not shared equally in the county's three-year decline in overdose deaths, with Black and Latino residents facing longer waits for treatment beds than white applicants.
Black and Latino residents of Wentworth County died of overdoses at nearly twice the rate of white residents relative to population share over the past three years, according to a new county health department report, even as the county’s overall overdose death count has fallen for three consecutive years.
The report, the first neighborhood-level breakdown the department has published since overdose deaths peaked at 118 three years ago, found that Lowertown, where Black and Latino residents make up a larger share of the population than in the county overall, accounted for a disproportionate share of the decline’s remaining deaths even as the raw citywide numbers improved.
A decline that hasn’t reached everyone equally
“We’ve been telling a story about a countywide decline, and that story is true, but it’s not the whole story,” said Dr. Kwame Asare, director of the Wentworth County Department of Health. “When you break the numbers down by neighborhood and by race, the improvement is real but it is not landing evenly, and Lowertown in particular has not seen the same rate of decline as the county as a whole.”
The report found that treatment-bed access, not just overdose incidence, tracked closely with the disparity. Wayfinder Recovery Services’ Lowertown sober-living facility, despite adding 14 beds over the past 18 months, still reports a longer average wait for Black and Latino applicants than white applicants, a gap Asare said the department could not fully explain from the data alone.
Council Member Terrence Boudreaux, who represents Lowertown, said the findings confirmed what he had heard anecdotally from constituents for years. “Every time this council votes on where treatment funding goes, we’re told the money follows need,” Boudreaux said. “This report is the first real evidence I’ve seen that shows the need in Lowertown hasn’t been getting the same follow-through as need elsewhere in the county.”
I don’t think anybody set out to build a system that treats a life in Lowertown differently than a life in Riverside Heights. But intentions don’t show up in a wait-time spreadsheet. Only outcomes do, and right now the outcomes are telling us something we need to fix.
Council Member Terrence Boudreaux, District 2 (Lowertown)
Possible causes, and disputes over them
Donna Wysocki, executive director of Wayfinder Recovery Services, said her organization’s own intake data pointed to differences in how referrals reach the program. “A lot of our referrals still come through word of mouth or through a hospital discharge process,” Wysocki said. “If those referral pathways aren’t reaching certain neighborhoods as consistently, the bed capacity can be identical and the outcomes still won’t be.”
Dr. Angela Whitcombe, chief executive of Bellwater General Health System, said the hospital’s emergency department has reduced the share of overdose patients discharged without a treatment referral from roughly 40 percent to under 15 percent, but acknowledged the hospital had not previously tracked whether that improvement was distributed evenly by race. “That’s a gap in our own data that this report has made clear we need to close,” Whitcombe said. “We can’t manage what we’re not measuring, and apparently we haven’t been measuring this closely enough.”
Not all officials agreed on what the report implies. Council Member Luis Bettencourt, who represents the gentrifying Foundry Row district, cautioned against reading too much into neighborhood-level breakdowns without accounting for differences in population density and existing service locations. “I don’t doubt the disparity is real,” Bettencourt said. “I just want us to be precise about whether the fix is more beds in Lowertown specifically, or a broader referral and outreach problem that happens to show up most visibly there.”
What comes next
Asare said the department plans to convene a working group with Wayfinder, Bellwater General and the Riverside Free Clinic to examine referral pathways by neighborhood and race, with recommendations expected before the county board’s next budget cycle. He said the department is also considering whether to expand the county’s outreach van routes further into Lowertown’s most affected blocks, building on the same model credited with reaching Cedar Hollow residents like Curtis Boone, who now trains new volunteers for the program. The department’s separate expansion of fentanyl test strip distribution earlier this year has not yet been evaluated for whether it is reaching Lowertown at the same rate as other neighborhoods, Asare said.
“The declining numbers are real, and I don’t want to undercut the work that produced them,” Asare said. “But a public health system that only tells you the average is doing better isn’t telling you the whole truth. This report exists because we owe Lowertown residents an honest account of where they actually stand.”
Boudreaux said he intends to raise the report’s findings at the council’s next budget hearing and will push for treatment funding allocations to include neighborhood-level targets rather than countywide totals alone. “A countywide number can go down while a neighborhood goes up,” he said. “We need to budget like we understand that, not just celebrate the average.”