NEW YORK — The number of U.S. fatal overdoses fell last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Wednesday. CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deb Houry called the dip “heartening news” and praised efforts to reduce the tally, but she noted “there are still families and friends losing their loved ones to drug overdoses at staggering …
A man living in the Tenderloin section of San Francisco displays what he claims to be the synthetic drug fentanyl. “It’s just really clear now from 50 years of trying to stop the supply, it doesn’t work,” Dr. David Goodman-Meza, an infectious disease doctor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, told me. But “kilo chasing” doesn’t work with …
The US was already fighting a serious opioid epidemic; the pandemic exacerbated the crisis, new statistics show. Overdose deaths soared to a record 93,000 last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government reported on Wednesday. That estimate far eclipses the high of about 72,000 drug overdose deaths reached the previous year and amounts to a 29 percent increase. …
