Some residents in Santa Monica, an idyllic beach town in Southern California, are pushing for an outdoor county-operated program, which distributes clean syringes weekly to homeless drug users near the city’s parks, to be moved indoors to a county-owned facility. The “overdose prevention program”—which is overseen by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s…

Some residents in Santa Monica, an idyllic beach town in Southern California, are pushing for an outdoor county-operated program, which distributes clean syringes weekly to homeless drug users near the city’s parks, to be moved indoors to a county-owned facility. The “overdose prevention program”—which is overseen by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s…

Los Angeles County homeless deaths have increased by 55 percent, mainly due to a rise in drug overdoses, a new report this month by the Los Angeles County’s Department of Health has revealed. Drug overdoses were the biggest cause, reaching 1,488 in 2021, according to the report (pdf). Additionally, the county found all deaths in the…

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said on March 14 that if elected, his government would launch a “massive” series of lawsuits amounting to $44 billion against large pharmaceutical multinationals for their role in Canada’s opioid and addiction crisis. “The people who profited from this misery should be the ones to pay the bill. It’s about bringing…

Commentary The tragic killing of two U.S. citizens this week in the border town of Matamoros, Mexico, should, in a just world, refocus American attention on the glaring problem of transnational drug cartels’ de facto control of large swaths of our perilously porous southern border. That the two Americans killed may have been mistaken by…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, working-age Americans were dying of non-COVID-19 causes at a rate about 25 percent above what would have been expected based on previous trends, a recent research paper shows. About 108,000 Americans aged 18–64 died of causes other than COVID-19 in excess of expected trends during the pandemic, say the Dec. 15…

LOS ANGELES—The mother of a 15-year-old girl who died of an overdose in a bathroom at Bernstein High School in Hollywood announced a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Dec. 14, alleging school officials knew there was a problem with drug use at the campus but took no action. LAUSD knew that…

LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a proposal Oct. 18 to place the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, or Narcan, at county libraries and train librarians on how to administer it. “Narcan is easy to use, anyone can carry it, and it saves lives,” Supervisor Janice Hahn, who introduced the motion, said in…

As the dual forces of the pandemic and fentanyl drive up overdose deaths, bail reform is inflaming the crisis even further, according to Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler. Since the pandemic, Orange County drug overdose deaths have climbed from 79 in 2019 to 102 in 2020 and 123 in 2021, according to data published…

As the dual forces of the pandemic and fentanyl drive up overdose deaths, bail reform is inflaming the crisis even further, according to Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler. Since the pandemic, Orange County drug overdose deaths have climbed from 79 in 2019 to 102 in 2020 and 123 in 2021, according to data published…