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This is no doubt going to be a boon to the city. Tourists love this kind of vibrancy. Families take a look at these scenes, and it gives them fond memories they’ll cherish for the rest of their lives.

An Upper Manhattan subway station is a needle graveyard, with the tracks littered with hundreds of used syringes tossed by junkies after they shoot up on the platforms, straphangers say. “My husband doesn’t let me go out by myself [to the station] at night, he’s horrified,” said chef Laura Licona, 49, of the cavernous 1 Line transit hub at West 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. “The drug use has been a problem and compounded big time.” The Post recently witnessed a half-dozen junkies injecting themselves there, just a few yards away from parents and elementary school children. […] The...

A decade ago, most people thought of Tylenol (acetaminophen) as a medicine for fever, malaise and minor aches and pains. Nobody imagined that it would become the go-to drug for treating moderate, let alone severe, postoperative pain. But this is just what has happened. Thanks to pressure from lawmakers, government agencies and policymakers who inserted themselves into the patient-doctor relationship, patients became the victims of the never-ending war on drugs. Now, doctors frequently offer only acetaminophen to treat painful conditions despite the drug’s inability to remedy them. Policymakers’ exaggerated fear of opioids has pressured hospitals, doctors and dentists to switch...

The overdose-reversing drug naloxone should be made available over the counter to aid the national response to the opioid crisis, U.S. health advisers said Wednesday. The panel of Food and Drug Administration experts voted unanimously in favor of the switch after a full day of presentations and discussions centered on whether untrained users would be able to safely and effectively use the nasal spray in emergency situations. The positive vote, which is not binding, came despite concerns from some panel members about the drug’s instructions and packaging, which caused confusion among some people in a company study. The manufacturer, Emergent...

NEW YORK, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Retailers ranging from Walmart to Barnes & Noble are installing cameras or locking away items to deter shoplifters and thieves as they brace for a post-pandemic rush of holiday shoppers this year. Some, including Walmart, J.C. Penney, Apple Inc. and Walgreens, put in place new surveillance systems or more security guards. Others, like Target and Barnes & Noble, sealed merchandise behind plexiglass or tethered it with steel cables to store shelves. The retail industry has decried theft this holiday season as it struggles with excess inventories and a pullback in consumer spending at a...

A lengthy weekend exposé in The New York Post has chronicled how the outgoing de Blasio administration's long turning a blind eye has allowed the Garment District and some midtown Manhattan streets to increasingly resemble the deteriorating zombie-like feel of the open drug use problem in places like San Francisco, or Vancouver in Canada. It also calls to mind the reputation of an open-air crime infested drug den and "fear city" that came to define daily life and commutes in the 1970s and 1980s - also following more than a year of the Covid-induced exodus of people moving out of...

A National Institutes of Health study has found that using marijuana might increase the risk of suicidal ideation and attempts to self harm, even among those with no history of depression. The study, titled "Associations of Suicidality Trends With Cannabis Use as a Function of Sex and Depression Status," was published in the journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday. It involved face-to-face household interviews as part of the 2008-2019 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health conducted by researchers with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The National Institute on Drug Abuse sponsored the research as...

Residents of New York City's Upper West Side have complained that by housing hundreds of homeless people in three hotels during the coronavirus crisis, the area has become dangerous. They say that the area has now become a spectacle of drug taking, public urination and cat calling, and have called on city Mayor Bill de Blasio to take action. 'It doesn't feel safe anymore,' nanny Michele McDowall, 39, said to the The New York Post, telling the website that she was recently offered crack by a pair of homeless men as she pushed a toddler past Riverside Park at 79th...

Welcome to Mayor de Blasio’s New York City where people shoot up heroin in broad daylight and terrorists run wild in the streets looting and destroying businesses.A cluster of heroin junkies have taken over a stretch of NYC’s Midtown and turned it into a shooting gallery. According to the New York Post, junkies are shooting up heroin in broad daylight on Broadway and 40th Street and littering planters with used syringes.Photo via New York Post A cluster of junkies has turned Broadway into a shooting gallery, injecting drugs unhampered in broad daylight and then shuffling around in a zonked-out...

MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) – Fox 9 reports that the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s report released Monday ruled the death of George Floyd a homicide. The updated report states that on May 25, George Floyd experienced a cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained by a law enforcement officer(s). Ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is now charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter in connection to Floyd’s death.Earlier Monday, the attorneys for the family of George Floyd shared the findings of their separate autopsy, which determined that Floyd died of “asphyxia from sustained pressure” on his neck and back.The new Medical Examiner’s report also notes other significant conditions...

... Skid Row is the epicenter of L.A.’s addiction crisis. More than 12,000 homeless meth and heroin addicts pass through here each year, with thousands living in the vast network of tent encampments that line the sidewalks. For decades, L.A. has centralized public services in this tiny city-within-a-city. The result: it’s become an iron cage of the social state, with the highest concentration of homelessness, addiction, and overdose deaths in Los Angeles County. Fire Station 9, which covers Skid Row, is now the busiest firehouse in America, responding to 35,518 calls for service last year, including a record-high number of...

A flesh-eating bacteria associated with black-tar heroin has taken the lives of seven people in San Diego within the last two months. Now, the San Diego County Health and Human Services is warning health officials to stay cautious. According to the health department, these seven people died from myonecrosis, a severe infection that destroys muscle tissue. All of them were between the ages of 19 to 57, and five were male. According to the New York Times, the seven deceased victims were "among nine people admitted between Oct. 2 and Nov. 24 to county hospitals with the condition after injecting...

Wrongful death case. Opioids and alcohol. “The motion hinged on the defendant's contention that law enforcement had failed to preserve bottles of alcohol, pill bottles and pills, and cash, and had failed to properly test F.E. for the presence of alcohol before determining the cause of his death.”

FULL TITLE: Wendy's manager is under fire for blaming his employees' poor service on having a 'talentless pool of ex-junkies' to hire from in the small Massachusetts town A Wendy's manager has sparked outrage for insulting his employees and bashing his Massachusetts town as a drug-riddled, talentless 'pool of ex-junkies'. Wendy's customer Matthew Rose said that he had been shocked by the bad service he received when he visited the restaurant on Cranberry Highway in Wareham on August 3. He says he returned a few days later, to a similarly terrible experience. He decided to send a complaint to Wendy's...

STREET JUNKIES DREAM BILL “We’ve seen the rise of powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl that have the potential to make an already terrible problem worse. Exposure to miniscule amounts can have deadly consequences for users as well as first responders. That’s why this bill takes a broad-spectrum approach to meet the opioid crisis head on.” “The bill reauthorizes critical substance abuse prevention programs, expands access to treatment and provides law enforcement with tools to stop the trafficking of illicit substances.” The bill certainly gives more attention to treatment of addiction – creating a grant program to comprehensive recovery centers that...

For those of us living in cities, the memories of the 2007 economic crash are a distant memory. But for our neighbors in rural counties, the ghosts of the depression are still haunting vacant towns where farming and manufacturing used to thrive. According to the Economic Research Service arm of the USDA, rural and metro employment equalized in the early part of 2008 before bottoming out, but while metro employment has more than recovered, rural employment has yet to achieve parity with its pre-crash levels. Farmers are suffering especially hard, and many are having to find supplemental work off the...

On May 1, Jason Bigelow’s body was discovered in an abandoned house near High Point. He had been missing from his Asheboro home for a week, and while the autopsy results are still pending, his wife, Anna, has no doubt what the cause of death was. On April 30, the day before he was found, she posted this on Facebook in one angry, anguished burst: “My husband is missing and no one has heard from him in 6 days. Even in his darkest of times he would have not gone that long without communication. It’s hard to know what...

Teenagers armed themselves with a megaphone and gathered outside the Governor’s Mansion in downtown Austin Sunday night to try and get attention for their cause. “Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Texas legislators -- for as long as this is happening, we will stand to make sure that common-sense gun laws are enacted,” yelled one of the speakers through the device... The students also staged a “die-in,” laying down on the ground for 23 minutes as if they were dead -- one minute for every school shooting since the start of the school year... These students also want to end the culture...

San Francisco’s mayor plans to put medical teams on the streets to distribute a drug that curbs heroin cravings in opioid addicts, an initiative he says will be the first in the country. Mayor Mark Farrell announced Thursday he will allocate $6 million for 10 new public health clinicians to provide the opioid treatment medicine buprenorphine, known as Suboxone, directly to users. Buprenorphine is a daily pill or dissolvable strip that reduces cravings and alleviates withdrawal symptoms. It also reduces risk of overdose. Video and photos of people shooting up drugs in public have gone viral in recent weeks and...

The body of Simon Colley was found on a beach in Llandudno, Wales, on April 29... RNLI staff member Andrew Jones was looking through his camera when he spotted what he thought was a body near the boathouse, coroner John Gittins said. He called a colleague and considered trying to resuscitate the man, but soon realised he was dead. A postmortem was carried out but a decision on the cause of death has been deferred for toxicology tests. He narrowly avoided being sent to jail last March for desecrating the Cenotaph at St Peter’s Square in Manchester city centre last...