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.
Public health officials are adopting a law-enforcement tool, the mass spectrometer, to instantly identify potentially deadly levels of opioids in local drug supplies.
The National Sheriffs' Association has published a detailed guide to jail-based medication-assisted treatment. States hardest hit by opioids are moving fastest to get inmates the help needed to quit.
Within days of an OD from opioids or other drugs, users in Huntington, W.Va., are visited by a quick-response team at home, the hospital or in jail. Reversing an OD is just recovery's first step.
College campuses are growing increasingly concerned about how to keep students safe amid a national opioid crisis. Some schools provide free and easy access to drugs that can reverse an overdose.
Prosecutors in 20 states are using old laws to file homicide charges to hold family and friends accountable in opioid-related deaths. The penalty is steep and experts debate its effectiveness.
The U.S. surgeon general has recommended that naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug, be widely available to consumers. But there are several barriers to consumers' ability to acquire it.
Researchers say hospitals are missing an opportunity to help people with opioid addiction get into treatment by not doing enough when they show up in emergency rooms after an overdose.
With price hikes and rising demand, the drug naloxone, which can reverse an opioid overdose, is taking up an ever-larger share of emergency department budgets.
People often turn to public restrooms as a place to get high on opioids. It has led some establishments to close their facilities, while others are training employees to help people who overdose.
Emergency room doctors are just beginning to study a new kind of casualty in the opioid epidemic — patients who survive an overdose, but walk away with brain damage, kidney failure or dead muscle.
The number of people who have used opioid painkillers is still rising, according to a new NPR-Truven Health Analytics poll. But they're also worried about addiction, overdose and side effects.
Most of the millions taking prescription painkillers are older than 45, research shows, and there's been a recent increase in drug overdose deaths among people over 55. Drug mixing is partly to blame.
An increasing number of opioid abusers are taking huge doses of Imodium to ease withdrawal symptoms or get high. But at those high doses, toxicologists warn, the normally safe drug can stop the heart.
Grieving for the loss of a loved one to drug overdose can be difficult when it is mixed with guilt and remorse. But support is scarce for those who are left behind.
U.S. drug officials have traced a sharp spike in the already climbing death toll from heroin overdoses to an additive — acetyl fentanyl. The fentanyl is being cooked up in clandestine labs in Mexico.
The wide availability of prescription painkillers has produced a rash of accidental overdoses and death. And sometimes, the opioids come from doctors...
