Twenty people have died of probable heroin overdoses in Milwaukee County since July 27. The Milwaukee County medical examiner's office says this is a photo of a typical drug-overdose death scene.(Photo: Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's Office, Milwaukee County Medical Examiner 's Office) Twenty people have died of probable heroin overdoses in Milwaukee County during the past two weeks, a toll the county medical examiner's office on Thursday called "unprecedented." The county typically averages one heroin death every three days, the office said. The medical examiner is investigating the possibility that other drugs, such as fentanyl, played a role in the deaths. [continues 390 words]
Tennessee looks at making naloxone, an easy-to-administer drug that can reverse the effects of opioid drug overdoses, widely available without a prescription. But will over-reliance on the medication be a long-term side effect? [photo] Thomas Clemons instructs people visiting a Baltimore needle exchange van on how to use naloxone to reverse heroin overdoses. More and more states, including Tennessee, are looking at the easy-to-administer drug as a way to stem increasing opioid overdose deaths.(Photo: Amy Davis/File) [continues 1422 words]
WASHINGTON (AP) - No one knew what was in the baggie. It was just a few tablespoons of crystalline powder seized back in April, clumped like snow that had partially melted and frozen again. Emily Dye, a 27-year-old forensic chemist at the Drug Enforcement Administration's Special Testing and Research Laboratory, did not know if anyone had died from taking this powder, or how much it would take to kill you. What she did know was this: New drugs were appearing in the lab every other week, things never before seen in this unmarked gray building in Sterling, Virginia. Increasingly, these new compounds were synthetic opioids designed to mimic fentanyl, a prescription painkiller up to 50 times stronger than heroin. [continues 2297 words]
[photo] County police have tracked the location of opiod overdoses and fatalities in 2016. (Anne Arundel County Police Department) Heroin overdoses reach new high in Annapolis, Anne Arundel. With less than one month left in 2016, the number of people killed by heroin and opioid overdoses in Annapolis and Anne Arundel has surpassed that of the past two years combined. County police Chief Timothy Altomare provided the latest overdose numbers during a phone interview Friday morning. While Altomare touted County Executive Steve Schuh's multifaceted approach to combating heroin by using public health and educational resources in addition to law enforcement, the police chief conceded that the drug continues to pose a significant challenge in the county. [continues 1070 words]
The reality of the fentanyl epidemic is brutal, says Victoria paramedic Tamara McNay, describing the scene of a drug overdose: The person is unresponsive, covered in vomit, with a needle sticking out of their arm. Sometimes, their breathing has stopped for so long they are in cardiac arrest. They are on the brink of death - and it is B.C. Ambulance paramedics' job to bring them back to life. But McNay, regional vice-president for the Ambulance Paramedics of B.C. union, said paramedics in Victoria do not have the resources to deal adequately with the spike in drug overdoses. [continues 1015 words]
Drake Smith knew he was going to overdose. He was in a bathroom downtown. His friends had told him to only do half a hit, but if you only do half, he said, you can't get the same rush. So he did the whole thing. The heroin was laced with fentanyl, an opioid up to 100 times stronger than heroin. It doesn't take much to overdose. A dose the weight of a grain of sand can bring on a heroin-like high. A dose the weight of two grains of sand can kill a healthy adult. [continues 1191 words]
PORTLAND, Ore. - The budtenders of the Rose City are relentlessly helpful with tips pairing a marijuana strain that is "equal parts fruity and musky" with a stimulating Sichuan dish. As Oregon, the place where empires once clashed over the global trade of beaver furs, glides into a second year of legalized recreational pot, the state is determined to show the world that a certain kind of drug prohibition belongs in history's Dumpster. Soon, with the likely passage of legal pot in California next month, all of the West Coast - from the tundra of Alaska to the sun-washed suburbs of San Diego - will be a confederacy of state-regulated marijuana use. [continues 730 words]
The man entered the Red Robin restaurant inside the Staten Island Mall two minutes after 6 p.m. on a Friday. He walked straight past the booths and tables and entered the men's room. A manager would find him there seven minutes later, lying on the floor with a needle and foaming at the mouth. His name was Jonathan Ayers, 27, and he was declared dead within the hour that evening, Sept. 9, apparently of a heroin overdose. Mr. Ayers's fatal overdose was the latest addition to a body count without precedent. So far in 2016, there have been 71 deaths that appear to be from heroin overdoses on the island, the Richmond County district attorney's office said, already on pace to more than double the record set two years ago. Nine people died of heroin overdoses in a recent 10-day period, prosecutors said. [continues 1789 words]
WASHINGTON - Across the nation, while public concern about heroin addiction is the highest it has been in years, the same can't be said about attention on the national political stage. Searches about "heroin" peaked last week for the third time this year at the highest level in the past five years, according to data from Google Trends, with the exception of a spike in interest in February 2014 when actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose. Drug overdoses from heroin tripled between 2010 and 2014, and more people died from drug overdoses than car crashes in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [continues 87 words]
Midwest health officials worried this would happen. It's why they brought together a tri-state coalition - Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky - to talk about the dangers, and it's why they issued a stern, desperate warning last month to first responders and addiction counselors who patrol the front lines of the opioid war every day. They said the situation was "dire." One Ohio coroner told users they were "literally gambling" with their lives. But their public plea could not prevent the heroin on their streets from being cut and sold with a new opioid analog 100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 stronger than morphine. [continues 826 words]
HUNTINGTON - Around 3:30 p.m. Monday, reports of overdoses started pouring into Cabell County 911 Dispatch. By 9 p.m., 26 overdoses had been reported, more than Cabell County EMS responds to in a week. Cabell County EMS Director Gordon Merry said all the victims had been revived using naloxone; however, the heroin they had used was laced with a substance so strong, it sometimes took more than one dose of the opioid overdose-reversing drug to revive them. "I know it will be too late when this is printed," Merry said, "but if you have heroin please see what is going on and don't use it. It could be your last time. People aren't familiar with what it is cut with and right now we don't know what it's been cut with." [continues 413 words]
Parents of a young man who died of substance abuse urge others to talk about addiction before they, too, face tragedy Thank you to Amy Waldron for her letter ("Bringing addiction out of the shadows," July 28) regarding the death of our son, Alex Hoehn, from substance abuse. Amy's comments were both accurate and poignant, "Addiction is killing our young people at unprecedented rates. ... By bringing addiction out of the shadows and showing the faces of the people we are losing to this disease, we can continue to move forward toward breaking the stigma of addiction." Her response touched our hearts and we felt compelled to further share our story and the brutal effects of this horrific drug epidemic. [continues 497 words]
Preventing, treating are our only hopes to stem drug abuse, says Margret Kopala. The deadline for the City of Ottawa's supervised injection site consultations was Monday, but Ottawans may be forgiven for finding the whole exercise moot. With drug abuse reaching epidemic proportions in our cities, injection facilities, whatever their merits, are a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed. Even British Columbia, devoted to harm reduction protocols and, since 2003, the home of Canada's first injection site, Insite, is worried. According to the Coroners Service of British Columbia, illicit-drug overdose deaths have increased from 200 in 2007 to a projected 800 in 2016. The introduction of the designer drug fentanyl isn't solely to blame. Heroin overdoses - on their own or laced with fentanyl - are a major factor. [continues 524 words]
PORTLAND, Me. - A woman in her 30s was sitting in a car in a parking lot here last month, shooting up heroin, when she overdosed. Even after the men she was with injected her with naloxone, the drug that reverses opioid overdoses, she remained unconscious. They called 911. Firefighters arrived and administered oxygen to improve her breathing, but her skin had grown gray and her lips had turned blue. As she lay on the asphalt, the paramedics slipped a needle into her arm and injected another dose of naloxone. [continues 1545 words]
Critics Say Drug Allows Addicts to Take More Risks PORTLAND, Maine - A woman in her 30s was sitting in a car in a parking lot here last month, shooting up heroin, when she overdosed. Even after the men she was with injected her with naloxone, the drug that reverses opioid overdoses, she remained unconscious. They called 911. Firefighters arrived and administered oxygen to improve her breathing, but her skin had grown gray and her lips had turned blue. As she lay on the asphalt, the paramedics slipped a needle into her arm and injected another dose of naloxone. [continues 668 words]
President Obama has committed to sign the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which includes among its provisions new policies to reduce inappropriate prescribing of prescription opioids such as Oxycontin and Vicodin. Given the ongoing epidemic of addiction and death caused by opioid painkillers, this seems like sensible public-health policy, but some critics charge that tighter prescribing rules simply cause prescription opioid users to switch to heroin, thereby feeding a second opioid epidemic. The New England Journal of Medicine recently published the first systematic analysis of this terrifying possibility. [continues 443 words]
About this series The nation is in the midst of a prescription opioid and heroin overdose epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 44 people in the U.S. die every day from an overdose of prescription painkillers alone. This series examines how the epidemic is affecting Butte County and how it will respond. Today: How did Butte County end up with one of the worst drug-induced death rates in the state? Tomorrow: A man who died from an alcohol and opioid overdose is remembered by his mother and a friend. [continues 1286 words]
On June 20, The Day published a guest commentary by Jim Spellman of Groton, "Stopping heroin at the source," which contended that "two appropriate recommendations have been offered to counter the heroin crisis - treat it as an epidemic and counter it as a village." Left unclear was who determined that these are the two appropriate recommendations in all of Connecticut. But, on his first point, I will agree that the heroin crisis in our state should be treated as an epidemic. [continues 501 words]
WASHINGTON - When Sen. Rob Portman's campaign launched its first TV ads of 2016, it wasn't hard to sense a theme. The first ad focused on Portman's work to fight Ohio's drug crisis. The second told the story of Tyler Campbell, a young man from Pickerington who died of a heroin overdose. A third told of a Lakewood woman who is a recovering heroin addict. And a fourth told the story of a young woman from Carrollton who died of a heroin overdose. [continues 800 words]
As the Heroin Epidemic Grows Worse, People Are Finally Talking About It "HERE THEY COME!" The call goes up before the bicycles roll to a complete stop on a recent Friday, sending a ripple of energy up and down the Central Eastside block. Soon, grateful drug users are coming from every direction to speak with four volunteers bearing stuffed backpacks and two bountiful bike trailers. "Needles?" asks one woman. "Who brought needles?" She's handed a pack of 50 new syringes, and offered her choice of an array of injection materials-three sizes of cotton wads, two kinds of rubber tourniquets (in case anyone's allergic to latex), tiny cups for cooking heroin, kits for treating wounds caused by injections, and more. [continues 1444 words]
