Drugs

 Guardian - They died in parks, cars, motels, alleyways, bus stops, bathrooms and tents. Some collapsed on busy city streets, others in remote desert terrain. The oldest victim was 81. The youngest was one day old. A new analysis by the Guardian reveals that fentanyl claimed the lives of more than 2,100 people living on the streets of Los Angeles county and in homeless shelters between 2014 to 2023.Last year, the LA county medical examiner for the first time logged more than 1,000 drug-related deaths of unhoused people, including a record-high of 728 overdoses linked to fentanyl.The figures illustrate the staggering toll as fentanyl wreaks havoc on unhoused communities in LA, an emergency fueled by a growing housing crisis and the worst overdose epidemic in US history, which in recent years has seen the powerful synthetic opioid rapidly infiltrate communities on the west coast.