Police departments are toning down the law enforcement, and offering drug users recovery help instead. But convincing drug users to accept the help is not easy.
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Nevada's Washoe County says it's trying to boost the state's efforts to reduce deaths from opioid overdoes by providing jail inmates with overdose education and anti-overdose drugs as they are released.
Keri Blakinger spent nearly two years locked up on narcotics charges before becoming a journalist. "I've been so privileged in so many ways to end up with hope and second chances," she says.
A nonprofit in Philadelphia is making plans to open a supervised drug injection site — which is against the law. Their response to justice department threats of a crackdown? "Bring it on."
Proposals in several cities to offer drug users access to a safe space to consume drugs have caused a political stir, but what do we really know about the effectiveness of safe injection sites?
A pediatrician is working to make sure every hospital in Kansas can give babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome the soft start they need, ideally right next to their mothers.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A new report indicates Nevada's amphetamine death rate is highest in the nation and soon will eclipse the state's prescription opioid death rate if current trends continue.
The high court in Massachusetts is weighing legal and scientific evidence to decide whether a woman convicted of larceny violated the terms of her probation by relapsing into drug use.
The Food and Drug Administration says abuse of the painkiller Opana ER has fueled an outbreak of HIV, hepatitis C and a serious blood disorder, though it was reformulated to try to reduce abuse.
The director of National Drug Control Policy under President Obama, Michael Botticelli, says the proposed GOP health bill would decrease access to treatment in the middle of an opioid crisis.
Charlie Oen was addicted to heroin as a teenager. At 25, he's now clean and a peer counselor in Lima, Ohio, where he tries to help people who started using drugs before he was born.
Prescott, Ariz., has become a destination of choice for people trying to get sober, with growing numbers of group homes for recovering addicts. Some residents are calling for regulation of the homes.
"We have this idea that if we are just cruel enough and mean enough ... to people with addiction, that they will suddenly wake up and stop, and that is not the case," journalist Maia Szalavitz says.
After four or five of his patients died from opioid overdoses in one month, Craig Smith, a family doctor in Bridgton, Maine, realized he couldn't wait for someone else to offer addiction treatment.
The FDA could soon approve an implantable form of a drug used to treat opioid addiction. While the approach helped patients avoid relapse in tests, its price may be prohibitive for some, doctors say.
When a woman addicted to opioids gives birth, she is too often dismissed as an obstacle to her infant's health. A Connecticut hospital is challenging that attitude — and the culture of care.
