Drug Overdoses

Gadsden County Sheriff Morris Young who says "fentanyl wasn't in our vocabulary," prior to last weekend.

She said the state will increase messaging as part of efforts to prevent future mass overdoses.

It was a deadly weekend involving drugs in Gadsden County. The sheriff’s office handled a spike of fentanyl overdoses, most of them on Friday. Nine people died.

The law could result in methamphetamine dealers facing a death sentence if drugs they distribute kills someone.

Three years after a government site launched to connect Americans to treatment, finding addiction care is still a struggle.

The Florida Legislature balked this year at a bill that would decriminalize fentanyl test devices, which remain illegal in about half of the states under drug paraphernalia laws adopted decades ago, drug policy experts say.

The order targeted drugs known as nitazenes, which Moody’s office said have been linked since 2022 to at least 15 deaths in Florida, including five reported by the Pasco-Pinellas medical examiner.

In statehouses across the country, lawmakers have been considering and adopting laws on two fronts: reducing the risk to users and increasing the penalties for dealing fentanyl or mixing it with other drugs.

A new wave of opioid deaths, fueled by fentanyl, is raising old fears in Palm Beach County. Meantime, sheriff's office policy on naloxone is an outlier in the state.

According to Ocala police, investigations have shown the drugs responsible for many of the overdose deaths enter the U.S. from Mexico.

The bill would allow naloxone to be administered by school staff trained to recognize an opioid overdose.

After a 26% increase in opioid overdoses in Florida over the previous year,. Project Opioid founder Andrae Bailey says the pandemic accelerated the real problem: the synthetic opioid fentanyl flooding the markets.