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One of the nation’s largest drug distributors has agreed to pay $44 million in fines to resolve allegations that it failed to alert the Drug Enforcement Administration to suspicious orders of powerful narcotics by pharmacies in Florida, Maryland and New York. The agreement on monetary penalties comes more than four years after the DEA reached an administrative settlement with the mammoth drug wholesaler Cardinal Health over alleged misconduct at its Lakeland, Fla., drug distribution warehouse. (Bernstein and Higham, 1/11)

Drug overdose deaths in Philadelphia surged to 900 last year — nearly a 30 percent increase in a single year — as the nation continued to grapple with an epidemic of opioid use and abuse. City health officials announced the numbers Wednesday as Mayor Kenney convened a 16-member task force of health and law officials. “Hopefully, 2017 is the year we get our arms around this problem,” Kenney said. “Failure is no longer an option.” There were 277 homicides tallied in Philadelphia last year. The number of drug overdoses was more than triple that number. (Wood, 1/11)

Police said 27-year-old Lindsay Newkirk told them she had done it before — shot a small amount of heroin into her own arm, then shot some into her father's. That's precisely what she said she did on a Friday in February at a motel in Columbus, Ohio. She said she passed out and, when she woke up, her father was unresponsive, according to the Columbus Dispatch.Her father, 55-year-old Leonard Newkirk, was dead. (Bever, 1/11)

When Ginny Lovitt found her brother had overdosed in 2013, there was nothing she could do "but call 911 and wait” while he died. Since then, she has made it her personal mission to teach anyone who will listen about a life-saving drug that can bring someone back from the brink of death. In the fourth story of her Hooked on Heroin series, WTOP's Jamie Forzato examines naloxone, the efforts to put it in more hands and the obstacles that remain. (1/12)