Tag: Heroin

Overdose or Poisoning? A New Debate Over What to Call a Drug Death.

The death certificate for Ryan Bagwell, a 19-year-old from Mission, Texas, states that he died from a fentanyl overdose. His mother, Sandra Bagwell, says that is wrong. On an April night in 2022, he swallowed one pill from a bottle of Percocet, a prescription painkiller that he and a friend bought earlier that day at […]

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Naloxone Man: The IRL Superhero Teaching People How to Reverse Overdoses

Naloxone Man (AKA George Charlton) in costume. Photos: courtesy of George Charlton Please note this article features graphic mentions of self harm. A community centre in a suburban market town isn’t the first place you think of when it comes to the frontlines of Britain’s opioid crisis, but that’s where I am on a cold […]

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Safe Injection Sites Don’t Lead to More Crime, New Study Finds

Switzerland, for example, opened its first overdose prevention site in 1986. Recognizing that having people remain reliant on getting their drugs illegally was not optimal, it began piloting heroin prescriptions in 1992. Between the early 1990s and the mid-to-late- 2000s, overdose death rates were cut in half and the number of people starting heroin use […]

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‘A Monster’: Super Meth and Other Drugs Push Crisis Beyond Opioids

Dr. Nic Helmstetter crab-walked down a steep, rain-slicked trail into a grove of maple and cottonwood trees to his destination: a dozen tents in a clearing by the Kalamazoo River, surrounded by the detritus of lives perpetually on the move. Discarded red plastic cups. A wet sock flung over a bush. A carpet square. And […]

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