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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin Police said Tuesday they’re launching an investigation into who provided drugs that resulted in 51 suspected overdoses and possibly eight deaths throughout Austin. During a news conference Tuesday afternoon, detectives told reporters they detained at least two people, calling them persons of interest in this deadly overdose investigation. One of those people is now facing a felony charge of in possession of a firearm, police said. However, more charges and arrests could be forthcoming. “It is apparent there is a deadly batch of illicit narcotics in our community,” APD Asst. Chief Eric Fitzgerald said, adding police...

In a recent interview on Fox News, former President Donald Trump warned, "Our country is being poisoned from within by the drugs and by all of the other crime that's taking place." According to the latest provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between November 2019 and October 2023, there have been a shocking 270,000 overdose deaths from synthetic opioids - or about 80,000 overdose deaths per year - across the nation. Under the Biden administration's first term, Americans have been increasingly traumatized by the tsunami of overdose deaths as disastrous open southern border policies flood the...

As authorities clamp down on fentanyl distribution and the amount of heroin produced in Afghanistan decreases under the Taliban, criminal enterprises have turned to a deadly alternative. Some health agencies in Europe are reporting a rise in deaths and overdoses from a type of synthetic opioid that can reportedly be hundreds of times stronger than heroin and up to forty times stronger than fentanyl. 2-Benzyl Benzimidazole opioids, commonly known as nitazines, are a class of synthetic compound developed in the 1950s as painkillers, but which were never approved for use as medicines. Because of their potency, compared with natural opioids...

Two deaths in Boulder County, Colorado, in 2023 are the latest in the U.S. to be blamed on the powerful class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes. Most health systems cannot detect nitazenes, so the exact number of overdoses is unknown, but they’re implicated in more than 200 deaths in Europe and North America since 2019, including 11 in Colorado since 2021. One of the two Boulder County deaths is linked to a new formulation called N-Desethyl etonitazene, which was identified by a national laboratory, and is thought to be the first related death. The Conversation interviewed Dr. Christopher Holstege, professor...

Singer Jelly Roll speaks at the Senate hearing on a fentanyl bill, saying 190 people in America die daily from a drug overdose.

Three years after Oregon voted to de-criminalize drug offences - residents are now begging to reverse their decision after seeing an astonishing number of deaths from opioid overdoses. In 2020 - Oregon voters approved a measure to decriminalize the possession of all drugs including heroin and cocaine. The proposal, known as Oregon Ballot Measure 110, passed with 58.8 percent support. Now residents of the liberal state are crying out to their politicians to do something about the open-air drug markets that their cities have turned into. Opioid deaths in Oregon have gone up from 280, before the de-criminalization was voted...

An abandoned tower looms 18-stories into the sky. Zombie-like bodies with blank stares shake and stumble about aimlessly as a corpse lies on the cold, blood-stained pavement. Dangerous criminals wielding weapons indiscriminately shoot firearms and swing knives and machetes. Deadly potions are passed around, and sharp needles poke up from the ground. Armed guards patrol the premises as surveillance cameras watch every move. This morbid scene isn’t the backdrop of a Halloween haunted house. It’s a real life scary situation outside of the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco. The conditions are so frightening, federal employees have been...

Portland's public safety commissioner has told people to not call 911 unless they're at risk of death - as the Democrat-run city continues to struggle with rampant drug use and a slew of overdoses. Commissioner Rene Gonzalez told locals that its emergency service hotline was overwhelmed with people calling about members of the public suffering fentanyl overdoses. Oregon decriminalized hard drug use three years ago. As a result, he urged people to only call 911 in a life or death emergency, as it was revealed paramedics had been called to deal with eight suspected fentanyl overdoses in the city's once-tony...

In September, Narcan — the first over-the-counter naloxone nasal spray approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration without a prescription — was rolled out to pharmacies and drugstores across the United States with a retail price of $44.99 for a pack of two devices. Experts have already hailed the widespread availability of the medication, which quickly reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, as a "lifesaving" tool amid alarming rates of drug overdose deaths. In 2021, more than 75% of those deaths involved opioids, with fentanyl contributing to more than 77% of adolescent overdose deaths that year. Indeed,...

Overdose deaths in Charlotte rose over 20% from a year ago and fentanyl is the main culprit, according to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Already this year CMPD has reported as many as 137 fatal overdoses and responded to 1,000 calls to aid overdose victims. Most of these involved fentanyl. One of these calls came late Sunday night, when a 32-year-old in Charlotte became the 137th victim, officials said at a press conference Monday. Dr. Jon Studnek, Medic’s deputy director, who joined CMPD Monday, said the agency treats about seven patients a day with suspected opioid overdoses. Medic does what it...

Deadly fentanyl is killing the equivalent of an entire classroom of children every week, staggering figures show. Fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid that's 100 times stronger than morphine, is ravaging America's youth. A recent study found that fentanyl was responsible for the death of 1,557 children in 2021 — the equivalent of 30 children every week.

Overdoses continue to skyrocket in B.C. seven years after the province declared the drug epidemic a public health emergency. Seven years after the province of British Columbia declared the drug epidemic a public health emergency, and just one month after the decriminalization of all drugs, overdoses continue to skyrocket. According to the Canadian Press, B.C. tragically set three new overdose records this March, just the second month after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government allowed the province to decriminalize all drugs starting February 1, 2023... In March, B.C. saw the most overdose calls ever recorded in one day (205), the...

The overdose death of a student at Bernstein High School in Hollywood Tuesday night added to an already troubling trend of increasing youth overdoses linked to Fentanyl. At least two other students were hospitalized after police say they ingested pills they believed were Percocet.

San Francisco officials on Tuesday unveiled what they said was a deliberately 'soft touch' scheme to deal with the city's relentless drug crisis - insisting that under their plan 'nobody's going to jail,' but remaining vague on how to end the problem. With nearly 1,700 fatal overdoses since the start of 2020, San Francisco's drug crisis has resulted in almost double the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. In June, the city's mayor, London Breed, announced that their notorious taxpayer-funded open-air drugs market will close at the end of the year.

Over 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Wednesday. Overdose fatalities, which already reached record highs in 2020, increased by 15 percent in 2021.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shows that the number of fatal overdose deaths among teenagers rose from 492 in 2019 to 954 in 2020, an increase of 94%. "For decades, we've seen overdose rates rising among adults, and teens have been insulated from that," said Joe Friedman, a public health researcher at the University of California-Los Angeles, as reported by NPR. "And now, for the first time, the overdose crisis is reaching teens as well." The problem fueling the overdoses apparently is fentanyl, according to the study, in the form of counterfeit prescription...

In one five-year period, teens and preteens in the US may have lost about 200,000 years of life to unintentional drug overdoses, according to a new study. The study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, may be one of the first to calculate lives lost to unintentional drug overdoses among young people. Researchers looked at overdose data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2015 and 2019 to calculate the total number of years of life lost for 10- to 19-year-olds who died during that time. If the data is expanded to include people up to 24 years...

Santa Cruz County is seeing a spike in fentanyl overdoses. Health officials say they are up 66% compared to last year. It's been an alarming surge that is impacting the entire community. The reasons behind those increases can be everything from depression during this pandemic, to fentanyl becoming more available to the community. "I had addictions. I was doing all of the same stuff that you hear about." This 55-year-old man didn't want us to use his real name, so we'll call him Bill. Six years after his mother died, he turned to heroin. While living homeless he encountered people...

The large-scale drug trafficking operation of an infamous cartel just got busted in a mountain state some 1,400 miles from its Mexican headquarters and only one U.S. official, a local prosecutor, has dared to acknowledge the obvious; “This poison is coming over from our southern border unchecked,” said the elected prosecutor of Colorado’s largest district. “It will not stop coming over the border from Mexico into our communities until the federal government takes that porous border seriously.” His name is John Kellner, district attorney in the state’s 18th Judicial District which serves a population of about 1.3 million and covers...

An absolutely gutting statistic on its face, which also plays into other flashpoint issues facing the country – including the COVID pandemic and the ongoing border crisis. We'll address both of those points below, but no matter how you analyze or slice it, this "top line" number – which offers partial quantification of suffering and addiction in our country – is just heartbreaking and appalling: ... More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses during the 12 months following the COVID-19 lockdowns, the most overdose deaths ever recorded in a one-year span, according to the Centers for Disease Control and...