Drugs

Many overdose patients end up in hospital emergency rooms, but before this week in D.C., they couldn’t get treatment for their addiction. Instead, hospitals would refer patients to treatment programs outside of the hospital.

Three D.C. hospitals have launched programs providing medication-assisted addiction treatment to recent overdose victims in emergency rooms, a key component in the District’s plan to reduce overdose deaths by half by the end of next year. …

In 2014, Department of Behavioral Health employees discovered fraud in a District contract. The city still works with the contractor.

D.C. officials have purchased 66,000 naloxone kits, part of a plan to dramatically increase the supply of a lifesaving opioid-overdose antidote that has been scarce on the streets of a city with one of the nation’s highest rates of drug…

District emergency officials are issuing a new warning about dangerous batches of suspected K2 hitting city streets, saying medics responded to dozens of overdose reports this week.

More than two months after D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) released a far-reaching plan to cut opioid overdose deaths in half by late 2020, key programs described in the plan have not been launched, according to city officials and service…

The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported in January that more than 130 people in the United States die every day due to an opioid overdose. Washington, D.C., ranks third in the country with the highest rates of overdose deaths,…

For two months in 2015, the city tried to get everyone who overdosed into treatment, with promising results. Then it stopped.

Amid angry testimony, the District reports a 30 percent reduction in opioid deaths in the last year. But leaders don’t trust that data point.

D.C. lawmakers, public health experts, doctors and addiction treatment providers forcefully criticized the city’s efforts to address an explosion in fatal opioid overdoses, saying at a D.C. Council hearing Monday that city officials failed…

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Friday that she plans to equip the District’s police officers with a life-saving overdose antidote, reversing her administration’s previous opposition to an initiative supporters say will help…

Mayor Bowser announced on Friday that she will move to equip D.C. police officers with naloxone, a lifesaving opioid overdose antidote.

Attorney general nominee William P. Barr said Tuesday that if confirmed, he would not interfere with the District’s decriminalization of marijuana, giving a boost to advocates who want to fully legalize pot in the nation’s capital.

D.C. lawmakers will hold a public hearing to examine failures in the city’s response to surging heroin deaths in African American neighborhoods and to assess future strategies for combating the opioid epidemic.

D.C. once had plenty of accessible inpatient detox programs, but one by one, they have gradually been shut down. Now there is just one left. Since October 2017, the Psychiatric Institute of Washington (PIW), located in Tenleytown, has had…

WASHINGTON — The arrest of two suspected drug dealers has led to the seizure of a cache of weapons, millions of dollars of heroin and a Maserati, District and federal officials announced Friday.

The Metropolitan Police Department has arrested two people in connection with a large seizure of illegal guns and drugs. Officers seized more than 88 pounds of heroin in the bust, making it the largest heroin seizure in D.C.-area history,…

For the past four years, the nation's capital has undergone its worst public-health crisis since the arrival of AIDS: an explosion of fatal drug overdoses among African Americans.