Drugs

They started turning up in emergency rooms early last November. One after another and then another. By the time the torrent subsided in February, some 280 people had overdosed in Dutchess County from what many believed was heroin but was often street drugs laced with an exponentially stronger narcotic called fentanyl. The overdoses and deaths…

Elected officials, law enforcement officers and others proclaim there’s a heroin “epidemic” sweeping the country, and it’s taking hold in rural and suburban communities once considered unlikely places to find illicit drugs. But nobody knows how many people have died. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 3,036 people died in 2010 from…

“A death isn’t officially ruled an overdose until the state medical examiner’s office says so, usually after an autopsy and tests to confirm the presence of drugs in the person’s body. And getting those results can take months or even years, a Patriot Ledger review of death certificates on file in Quincy, Weymouth and Braintree…

Today, the recovering addict climbs into a taxi cab at 5 a.m. every weekday for a 60-mile drive to Crouse Hospital in Syracuse, where he receives methadone treatment. And that came only after a two-month delay on the program’s waiting list, which is now often nine months or longer. Across the Southern Tier, getting hooked…

Several hundred Iowans have died in recent years from overdoses involving prescription painkillers. The U.S. has seen a surge of such deaths in the past decade as sales of prescription painkillers have exploded. The issue of painkiller abuse has come into sharp focus in Iowa recently with the filing of criminal charges against several medical…

Trinity is part of a heartbreaking surge in babies born dependent on drugs because of their mothers’ addictions — which continues to escalate unabated despite Kentucky’s crackdown on prescription-drug abuse. The state has seen hospitalizations for drug-dependent newborns soar nearly 30 fold in a little more than a decade — from 28 in 2000 to…

Heroin, long a scourge of inner cities, has infiltrated suburbia and rural towns and is claiming the lives of an increasingly younger, middle-class and white male clientele at an alarming rate. But new statistics compiled for the Democrat and Chronicle by the office, which investigates suspected drug-related deaths across the region, show that more often than not…