In the News

  • abcnews.go.com: Judge urges action on '100 percent manmade' opioid crisis

    Posted 1/10/2018

    A federal judge on Tuesday set a goal of doing something about the nation's opioid epidemic this year, while noting the drug crisis is "100 percent man-made." Judge Dan Polster urged participants on all sides of lawsuits against drugmakers and distributors to work toward a common goal of reducing overdose deaths. He said the issue has come to courts because "other branches of government have punted" it.

  • wbur.org: Suicide Emerges In Understanding The Opioid Epidemic

    Posted 1/10/2018

    Mady Ohlman is 22 on the evening when she stands in a friend’s bathroom looking down at the sink. "I had set up a bunch of needles, filled with heroin, ‘cause I wanted to just do them back to back to back," Ohlman says. She doesn’t remember how many she injects before collapsing or how long she lies, drugged out, on the floor.

  • Deadline to Enter New Jersey Shout Down Drugs Competition is February 1

    Posted 1/8/2018

    MILLBURN — New Jersey high school students are invited to share their musical drug prevention messages as part of the 2018 New Jersey Shout Down Drugs music competition, organized by the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey.

  • usatoday.com: We mobilized against flu, cancer and heart attacks. Where's the urgency on opioids?

    Posted 1/5/2018

    This is a medical crisis virtually without precedent in our country and it needs to be treated accordingly, from the exam room to the legislature.

  • thehill.com: More than half think painkillers a major problem, but not a national emergency: report

    Posted 1/5/2018

    A little over half the country considers prescription painkiller addiction a major problem for the nation, but say it doesn't rise to the level of national emergency, a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine notes.

  • thehill.com: The best way to battle addiction is to put more resources into prevention

    Posted 1/5/2018

    The best way to battle addiction is to put more resources into prevention © Smartstock/iStock/Thinkstock Photos The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics just released some sobering news: Life expectancy in the United States dropped for the second year in a row due in large part to the 21 percent rise in drug overdose deaths to a whopping 63,600. That’s a staggering number that equates to 174 deaths everyday, just short of the number of casualties on 9/11 every two weeks.

  • qz.com: The opioid crisis is driving up deaths of millennials in the US

    Posted 1/5/2018

    The US is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It’s the world’s center of innovation and medical science, yet the country can’t keep their youth from dying. US millennials are now dying at such high rates that it’s driven life expectancy in the country to decline for two years in a row, the first time that’s happened since the early 1960s. The primary cause for the trend is the opioid crisis.

  • cnn.com: Opioids now kill more people than breast cancer

    Posted 1/3/2018

    (CNN)More than 63,600 lives were lost to drug overdose in 2016, the most lethal year yet of the drug overdose epidemic, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  • njherald.com: Feds employ data-driven early warning system in opioid fight

    Posted 1/3/2018

    Authorities have been going after so-called "pill mills" for years, but the new approach brings additional federal resources to bear against the escalating epidemic. Where prosecutors would spend months or longer building a case by relying on erratic informants and only limited data, the number-crunching by analysts in Washington provides information they say lets them quickly zero in on a region's top opioid prescribers.

  • statnews.com: The statistics don’t capture the opioid epidemic’s impact on children

    Posted 1/3/2018

    The epidemic of drug overdose deaths is a national disaster. It claimed more than 64,000 lives in 2016, many of them by opioid overdoses. That’s far more than the number of deaths from HIV/AIDS in the peak year of 1995.