When a private plane carrying the popular 21-year-old SoundCloud rapper Juice WRLD landed in Chicago after 1 a.m. on Sunday, law enforcement officials were waiting, having received information from a federal task force that guns and drugs might be onboard. It was during the subsequent early morning search of the plane and questioning of the […]
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President Trump said Friday that he would temporarily hold off on designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, saying he was doing so at the request of the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “All necessary work has been completed to declare Mexican Cartels terrorist organizations,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Statutorily we are […]
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MEXICO CITY — In 1982, when gunmen attacked a police station in rural Peru, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry blamed guerrillas from the Shining Path and called the crime an act of “narco-terrorism — the union of the vice of narcotics with the violence of terrorism.” With that, he coined a term that fused two major […]
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While there are still about a million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, in some of America’s largest cities, the news about H.I.V. and AIDS is surprisingly positive. “New H.I.V. Diagnoses Fall to Historic Lows,” the New York City Department of Health announced on Nov. 22, reporting that the largest city in the […]
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One afternoon in early October I sat with a pain management specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, during a long day of orientation in advance of an operation that would replace the joint sockets and femoral heads on both my right and left hips, driving metal rods into my thigh bones. Reading about the […]
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When things go wrong, those in power often promise to make it right. But do they? In this series, The Times investigates to see if those promises were kept. XINGTAI, China — An online pharmacy advertising itself as a seller of “high purity, real pure” fentanyl still responds right away to potential customers. “Which products […]
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Law enforcement officials said this week that they had taken down a “sophisticated” decade-long operation to ship drugs and cash through the United Parcel Service, leading to the arrests of 11 people and the seizure of commercial-grade equipment to manufacture illegal drugs. The scheme involved transporting both large amounts of narcotics throughout the eastern part […]
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CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — A border wall. Mass deportations. Punishing tariffs. A halt to foreign aid. An end to a decades-old trade deal. For years, President Trump has pressured or wielded threats against Mexico, hoping to force a policy change, excite his political base, or both. This week, he did it again, announcing that he […]
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LONDON — Homeless drug users in Scotland will be allowed to inject pharmaceutical-grade heroin twice a day under the supervision of medical officials as part of a new program intended to reduce drug deaths and H.I.V. infection. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week, a $1.5 million facility in Glasgow that opened […]
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President Trump said in an interview posted online Tuesday that he planned to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, owing to what he said was the high number of Americans killed by their activities. The comments, which were made in an interview with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and posted to his […]
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When the opioid crisis began to escalate some 20 years ago, many African-Americans had a layer of protection against it. But that protection didn’t come from the effectiveness of the American medical system. Instead, researchers believe, it came from racial stereotypes embedded within that system. As unlikely as it may seem, these negative stereotypes appear […]
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PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — Dylan Groves had suffered tremendously long before his tiny body was found in June at the bottom of a 30-foot well, decomposed and wrapped in plastic bags. He had been born a few months earlier with several drugs in his system, and had spent his first days in the care of a […]
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Michael Kearney could not understand how he had tested positive for drugs. He stared in disbelief at the corrections officers in an upstate New York prison where he was serving time. Though he had once been addicted to crack cocaine, he had been clean for two years. Yet the corrections officers had arrived with handcuffs, […]
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In September 2018, the rapper Mac Miller died of a drug overdose — a toxic combination of fentanyl, cocaine and alcohol. Three men were charged with distributing the drugs that allegedly led to his death. In July, Tyler Skaggs, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, died from asphyxia. Fentanyl, oxycodone and alcohol were found in […]
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The last mark my brother made on the world was a bloodstain on a bathroom floor. He died of a fentanyl overdose, nearly one year ago. He was 35 years old. His body was found in a rented room in the basement of a run-down house in Vancouver, where fatal opioid overdoses are now so […]
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In an effort to discourage drug use and vaping, a Catholic high school in Ohio has announced plans to begin testing its students for drugs and nicotine, joining what education professionals are calling a growing trend. Administrators at Stephen T. Badin High School in Hamilton, Ohio, said in a letter to parents this week that […]
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This week’s brutal ambush of a family in northern Mexico that left three women and six children dead was yet another shocking attack in a country enduring a year of record-setting violence. The attackers, who are believed to be members of organized crime, opened fire on three vehicles the family was traveling in, according to […]
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XINGTAI, China — A court in China convicted and sentenced to death on Thursday a man accused of trafficking fentanyl to the United States after a joint investigation with American law enforcement agencies. The case, involving nine defendants in all, was a rare example of cooperation against a surge in fentanyl-related deaths that American officials, […]
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Despite bipartisan calls to treat drug addiction as a public health issue rather than as a crime — and despite the legalization of marijuana in more states — arrests for drugs increased again last year. According to estimated crime statistics released by the F.B.I. in September, there were 1,654,282 arrests for drugs in 2018, a […]
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Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, died of an accidental overdose resulting from a toxic mixture of methadone, alcohol and other prescription drugs, according to a newly issued death certificate. Ms. Hill, 22, the daughter of Courtney Kennedy Hill, died at the family’s compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., on Aug. 1. Emergency […]
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It’s become a depressing fact that American politics is so polarized. That’s also true about where we live and work. We rarely interact with people from the hated other party, except maybe an outcast relative at Thanksgiving. From immigration to impeachment, guns to graft, it seems we’re divided on every topic. But maybe there is […]
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RIO DE JANEIRO — In the first quarter of 2019, the police killed an average of seven people a day in this city, the second most populous in Brazil. That’s the highest number in two decades. Even more atrocious is the fact that state security forces are responsible for 38 percent of the violent deaths […]
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For nearly two decades, Geneva Cooley assumed she would die in prison for nonviolent drug crimes. Then a judge reduced her sentence and changed her fate. By Rick Rojas Photographs by Lynsey Addario Oct. 28, 2019 WETUMPKA, Ala. — In the pink-walled dormitory of the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, nearly all of the inmates […]
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