Opioid Crisis & Drug War News
The opioid and drug addiction crisis is reported by The Daily Signal with news, analysis, and commentary on border enforcement, drug policy, and public safety.
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Meet the First Responders Who Encounter Death by Opioid Overdose
COLEBROOK, N.H.—Sally Zankowski is who comes when it’s too late. She’s there to define, investigate—and make sense of—another sudden death owed to opioid overdose in New Hampshire’s poorest and most remote county. Zankowski, 55, is the medical examiner for Coos County, which has the highest combined death rate due to drugs, alcohol, or suicide in… -
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How a Family Doctor Works With Police to Combat a Rural County’s Opioid Epidemic
COLEBROOK, N.H.—Bruce Latham, a lanky, self-employed doctor, occupies a unique position in the depths of rural New Hampshire’s opioid drug addiction crisis. As part of his practice in Colebrook, a town of 2,300 in Coos County, Latham responds to pain by prescribing opioid painkillers. He says he empathizes with patients’ propensity to become addicted to… -
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This Doctor Prescribed More Addictive Opioids Than Anyone Else in the State. Now He Tries to Overcome the Drug Crisis.
COLEBROOK, N.H.—Inside a dimly lit room at the largest health care provider in New Hampshire’s least populated county, a circle of drug addicts talk about how to recover. In this private setting a reporter agrees not to publish the addicts’ names, but most people in and around Colebrook, a decaying town of 2,300, know who… -
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In New Hampshire’s Poorest County, One Opioid Addict Helps Another Choose Life Over Death
BETHLEHEM, N.H.—They came to be addicted to drugs in different ways, but ended up in the same place. Steven Blaisdell, 26, a stocky, shy son of a mailman, was first prescribed pain medicine—the opioid OxyContin—as a teenager after he flipped over his four-wheeler and broke his left femur in half. Over the past 14 years,…