How we partnered with newsrooms around the country to uncover opioids' impact on a generation of Black men

The remarkable investigation by Frank Main, Elvia Malagón and Erica Thompson on the invisible toll that opioid overdoses has taken on an entire generation of now-older Black men was part of a national partnership with The New York Times and other news organizations around the country including the Baltimore Banner — which first uncovered this previously unknown pattern of deaths in Chicago and other cities — and Big Local News at Stanford University.

Using a statistical model, The Banner had discovered this pattern of elevated overdose death rates in Baltimore among Black men born between 1951 and 1970 while taking part in The Times’ local investigative reporting fellowship program.

In late September, Times and Banner editors invited the Sun-Times to participate in a larger project in which news organizations across the country would look at this issue in their own cities.

Main, who is a Watchdogs reporter on the Public Safety and Justice desk, was brought in because he has reported extensively on the impact of opiates in Chicago — not just in terms of crime but on individuals caught up in addiction and on a court program to get them help rather than send them to prison.

His initial thought was: Of course, older Black men are at a higher risk of dying because they often have other, pre-existing health conditions that make them more vulnerable to overdose. But, after talking with reporters at The Times and The Banner, he realized that, armed with a mountain of data from Stanford University’s Big Local News project, they’d made the remarkable discovery that this generation has been at the highest risk for decade after decade — even in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. And the data showed this was the case in Chicago.

Malagón, a reporter on the Race, Class and Communities desk, and Thompson, a reporter on the Features desk, were brought in because of their past reporting on and interest in social justice issues.

We knew that one key to telling this story would be getting the insights of Black men in this age group who were heroin addicts but got clean, survived and knew others who did not. So Main called a judge who runs Cook County’s drug court — a program he has written extensively about. The judge agreed to help set up interviews for himself and Thmpson with five lifelong substance-abuse survivors who opened up about why they began taking heroin as young men and described the trail of loss they’d experienced over the years, as friends and family members in their generation died of opioid poisoning.

Then, Main dived into the Cook County medical examiner’s data portal, which provides a lot of demographic information of people who’ve had autopsies. From that, he culled information on Black men born from 1950 to 1971 who died of opioid poisoning in 2024.The reporters used that information to do two things:

First, they mapped where the deaths occurred. That gave us an idea of where clusters of overdoses occurred and which parts of the city had the worst overdose problems among this generation of Black men.

Second, they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the autopsy reports of every one of those men. They then spent weeks reading each report and logging information about each death. From that, they gleaned common elements about how those men died — patterns that pointed to possible solutions, to ways that health-care providers might better target that generation for treatment in the future.

Armed with what they’d learned from their interviews and the medical examiner data, Malagón and Thompson hit the streets, riding along with a West Side community organization based in Austin that provides opioid-addiction-reversal medication to people in high-risk areas.They also interviewed medical experts and community leaders in parts of the city that have been hard-hit by the opioid crisis.

All of the reporters reached out to the families of the victims of the fatal overdoses — many of them worried about the stigma of overdose deaths. Malagón landed an interview with the family of one of them, which anchored the bottom of our story.

She also examined how a big pot of money from Illinois’ opioid-related settlements of lawsuits against Big Pharma is being spent on drug treatment.

The reporters also worked with Big Local News, The New York Times and The Baltimore Banner to incorporate their national findings into our findings — and to check and recheck the data to place it in proper context.

Our story — headlined “Opioids have been killing the same generation of Black men in Chicago for decades” — was published online on Dec. 20, the same day our news partners also published their stories online. As part of this collaboration, we also published The New York Times’ national take on this issue. The Times prominently cited our reporting, linked to our story from what it published online and credited the Sun-Times and our reporters by name.

Our partners at The Times and The Banner were thrilled with our participation and want to do more with us

The lead editor for The Banner — where all of this originated — described the personal stories that our reporters found “heartbreaking” and said: “Your local data analysis was smart and powerful. The impact you’ve already made is exceptional. Our editor Kimi Yoshino and everyone else here at The Banner are ecstatic about the results of this partnership. This is something we will be proud of for a long time.”