Does New York City Have A Drug Problem? 7 People Overdose In NYC As Heroin And Opioid Epidemic Continues
Seven people died in New York City between Friday and Sunday after overdosing on a variety of drugs, according to media reports. Within 50 hours during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, four people reportedly died in unintentional overdoses while three others used drugs in apparent suicides, authorities said.
The deaths were results of a variety of drug use including heroin, opioids and alcohol. The seven deaths spanned across four New York boroughs including Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, according to reports.
Two people in separate overdose cases were saved by paramedics over the weekend with the help of anti-overdose medication, naloxone. One victim was rushed to the hospital after overdosing in Staten Island. The other was a Bronx resident.
The wave of overdoses come following New York City’s highest rated year of overdoses ever. For the first time ever, the Big Apple recorded a four-digit death total with more than 1,000 residents overdosing on drugs in 2016, according to data compiled by New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
More than half of the overdoses recorded involved fentanyl, a powerful opioid often mixed with other popular drugs like cocaine, heroin and other painkillers which can be consumed by way of smoking, snorting or injecting intravenously. Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx saw the highest number of fentanyl overdoses in 2016, according to the report.
As the heroin and opioid epidemic continues to sweep the nation, there is some concern among health and government officials as to how people struggling with substance abuse will cope should President-Elect Donald Trump and the Republican Party repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
About 30-percent of people covered by Medicare and Medicaid extensions through Obamacare and the ACA suffer from drug addiction and some 220,000 people with substance use disorder would lose some, if not all, of their health insurance coverage if the ACA is repealed.
In 2015, more than 33,000 people died from overdoses caused by heroin and opioid use throughout the U.S.
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