Retiring Guy's Digest: GET ME RWRITE: Drug overdoses accelerate Baltimore's population loss

Since its 1950 peak of 949,708, Baltimore's population has decreased 40%. The city now has fewer residents than it did in the early 1910s, more than a century ago.

According to 2023 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, it has lost 20,359 residents since 2020.

Population: Wikipedia, U.S. Census Bureau

Headline: New York Times, 5/23/2024

For nearly all of the past three decades, Baltimore has had one of the highest fatal overdose rates of any large U.S. city. But for most of that period, even as the HBO series “The Wire” helped cement the city’s reputation as the U.S. heroin capital, the death rate was much closer to the national average than it is today.
Officials have long tried to solve the city’s drug problem with arrests and aggressive policing. Baltimore was also at the forefront of innovative public health strategies to address addiction. In 1994, the city’s Health Department was among the first in the nation to start a legal syringe exchange to stop the spread of H.I.V. and other blood-borne illnesses.

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