Overdose rescue kit (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)

The city of Rochester is not immune to our country’s overdose crisis. In 2020, the most recent year we have data from, we lost over 230 people to preventable overdoses in our city, and preliminary data points to that only increasing in 2021. Each person we are losing sends a shockwave through our communities and families, and we cannot give in to the idea that this epidemic is normal or unpreventable.

The reality is, every overdose death is preventable.

An Overdose Prevention Center (photo: @nycHealthy)

In December, New York City became the first municipality in the country to establish Overdose Prevention Centers to allow people with substance use disorders to safely use drugs under medical supervision while receiving services such as medical care, mental health treatment, and more. After years of consideration and discussions with other levels of government, the de Blasio administration gave a longtime nonprofit service-provider the go-ahead to offer safe injection sites.

Within the first three months, the two sites in East Harlem and Washington

Fighting addiction and overdose in NYC (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)

In recent weeks, news broke that according to provisional figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses within a 12-month period ending in April 2021. For the first time in history, overdose deaths in the United States have exceeded 100,000 in a year, a value greater than the toll

Mayor de Blasio makes an announcement (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

As the coronavirus ravaged New York, hospitals were flooded with patients and city services ground to a halt. Activists and elected officials worried that in the fray of the pandemic, with New Yorkers ordered to mostly stay inside and millions losing work, the already prevalent opioid epidemic in the state could be further exacerbated. But city and state health officials don’t have full grasp on the scope of the problem, and may not know for months, because of a lag in how drug

(photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

The New York City Health Department announced on Monday that the city’s efforts to curb the ongoing opioid crisis are showing progress, with 38 fewer drug overdose deaths in 2018 compared to the previous year. It is the first year over year drop in eight years, the city said.

There were 1,444 drug overdose deaths last year, down 3% from 1,482 in 2017, according to ...

Mayor de Blasio & HealingNYC (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

More than 1,400 New Yorkers died of drug overdoses in 2017, most of them the result of opioid abuse, and one of the next steps the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to take in fighting rampant opioid addiction is to open safe injection sites, which the administration is calling “overdose prevention centers.” There is currently no timeline for the four planned pilot sites to open, the city’s health commissioner said ...