Not sure what fentanyl death rates did in a particular neighborhood in the US, what I know is that CDC reported 100k overdose deaths /year for 2020-2021. That pales in comparison to the 600k excess deaths we had in the first 9 months of the pandemic in the US.

Specially if you consider that the overdose deaths did not suddenly appear in 2020.

That’s simply because fentanyl is cheap enough that the drug syndicates in the golden triangle are flooding the market with it. It’s so cheap to produce in industrial quantities using perfectly legal, easily acquired industrial chemicals that they really don’t care how many shipments get seized because a small amount can be cut into a whole lot of sellable product, so they don’t try as hard to smuggle it in.

You should remove markdown syntax from that link, it messes it up.