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The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Opioids

June 2024

  • Martha Gill

    Britain is on the brink of an opioid crisis. Punishing addicts won’t work

    Martha Gill
    It’s time to abandon cruel and costly policies that merely satisfy a severe, moralistic approach to drugs and their users

May 2024

  • Seth Numrich with his hand resting on the head of a giant puppet horse.

    Opioids the Opera: painkiller’s ‘lurid tale of greed’ inspires new production

  • A person holds a packaged NARCAN naloxone nasal spray

    More than 100,000 people in the US died of drug overdoses in 2023

  • Man sitting in shadowy alley

    ‘Alarming’ rise in drug overdoses in Australia as heroin-linked deaths surge 40%

  • Robbie Mason was thrown out of home at just 10 years old and left to fend for himself. He has been a Heroin user and recently to part in a drug trail at St Vincent hospital using hydromorphone. It is the only trial of this type of opioid replacement therapy in Australia. He said the trail had been very usefully for him but ended stopping the trail a few months ago. He helps to inform people about drug addiction from his lived experience. 2 May 2024. Sydney. Australia

    ‘A complete 180’: how a trial treatment in Sydney for heroin addiction is changing lives

April 2024

  • Addiction specialist Dr Hester Wilson

    Synthetic opioids: warning issued in NSW after nitazenes cause cluster of overdoses

    NSW Health investigating after powerful drugs detected in samples related to overdoses in Nepean Blue Mountains local health district
  • The logo of the music sharing platform SoundCloud, displayed on a tablet screen

    Synthetic opioids previously linked to UK deaths are being ‘advertised for sale on social media’

    Suppliers boast to undercover reporters about promoting illegal nitazenes, on SoundCloud and X
  • In this 25 April 1999 photo, Austin Eubanks hugs his girlfriend during a memorial service for Columbine high school shooting victims.

    Guns and lies
    A Columbine survivor’s tragic battle to reveal the ‘ripple effect’ of gun violence: trauma, addiction, suicide

    With 377 school shootings since Columbine, Americans are still reckoning with the real toll of these attacks

March 2024

  • Niko Vorobyov

    Synthetic opioids have arrived in Britain. As a former drug dealer, I know how the UK should respond

    Niko Vorobyov
    There are better ways of tackling addiction and overdoses than reverting to the tactics of a failed drugs war, says Dopeworld author Niko Vorobyov
  • Traci Letts

    ‘In a way, stigma is the leading cause of death’: the radical plan to tackle British Columbia’s overdose epidemic

    A ‘compassion club’ was blocked from buying pure drugs on the dark web to supply to users – now they are taking on Canada’s government in court
  • Person covered with blanket walks across street

    Oregon undoes groundbreaking drug decriminalization law

    Measure 110, an experiment approved in 2020, gets overhauled as state grapples with fentanyl crisis and growing public drug use

February 2024

  • Ambulance in New South Wales

    NSW Health warns of opioid risk after people took heroin thinking it was cocaine or methamphetamine

  • Man wearing yellow and black jacket holds a phone to his hear and looks at a notepad as a person in a red beanie looks at him

    How Oregon turned on its own trailblazing drug law: ‘Not the utopia we were promised’

  • Middle-aged Native man wearing baseball cap and red plaid collared shirt holds open small zip-up bag stocked with small, plastic-wrapped supplies. Behind him, another man sits on the lip of the open back of the van, with his arms crossed over one leg, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses.

    ‘We hold you sacred’: how a mobile drug unit is fighting the opioid crisis in the Cherokee Nation

  • orange pills in a packet

    Doctors fighting US opioid epidemic say insurance barrier impedes treatment

January 2024

  • A person holds a white tablet in the palm of their hand

    People buying opioids and sedatives online face deadly fakes, expert warns

  • Interior of a nursing room, at the drug addiction treatment center, CRI Porto Central, showing a day bed, stools, sink, and various medical paraphernalia on a metal shelf

    Drug consumption rooms could save thousands of UK lives, study finds

December 2023

  • Bottles of prescription painkiller OxyContin at a local pharmacy in Provo, Utah, on 25 April 2017.

    US opioid activists argue against Sackler family immunity in Purdue Pharma deal

    Supreme court to review immunity of Sacklers from prosecution under a 2019 bankruptcy settlement with the OxyContin maker
  • illustration of drug user behind a medical screen

    ‘Drug use is a health problem’: inside one of the world’s oldest legal consumption rooms

    At Quai 9 in Geneva, safe equipment and healthcare have cut overdoses and illnesses among addicts. But around the world, opinion is divided on whether such projects really work
  • Nan Goldin speaks during a protest in front of the courthouse where the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy is taking place, in White Plains, NY, in August 2021

    Nan Goldin named art world’s most influential figure

    Photographer and campaigner against Sackler family tops ArtReview Power 100 list
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