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A medication marketed as a nonaddictive nerve-pain reliever and anticonvulsant is finding its way into Maine’s illicit drug market. A seizure of gabapentin, like the 1,253 pills recently in Old Town, is a rarity in the state, but is part of a growing national trend of the drug being found in fatal overdoses. At the same time, prescription rates for gabapentin continue to climb. (Loftus, 2/13)

A veterinary tranquilizer that can cause serious wounds for regular users is spreading menace within the illicit drug supply. Xylazine, authorized only for animals, is one ingredient in an increasingly toxic brew of illicit drugs that killed a record of nearly 107,000 people in the U.S. in 2021. It is typically mixed with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that itself has broadly infiltrated U.S. drug supply, including in supplies of cocaine and methamphetamine. Taken together, the volatile mixing means drug users often don’t know what’s in the substances they take. (Kamp and Wernau, 2/12)

A bipartisan panel of governors from Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico and North Dakota said they agreed on elements of each other’s ideas to address addiction and the fentanyl crisis, speaking Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “That is probably going to be the nexus of real bipartisan work,” Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said to North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, after he described treating addiction as a disease. The governors were in Washington, D.C., for the National Governors Association conference, and dealing with fentanyl was one area where they clearly found common cause. (Olander, 2/12)

U.S. cities and counties spent years battling the pharmaceutical industry over the opioid crisis. Now that billions of dollars in settlement funds are beginning to flow, the experiences of two Ohio counties highlight a new challenge: how to spend the money. Many state and local governments are starting to receive funds from national legal settlements expected to total roughly $50 billion over the next two decades. Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County and neighboring Summit County, where Akron is located, got a head start. (Mulvaney, 2/13)

As a child welfare specialist for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma more than a decade ago, Juli Skinner saw firsthand the impact of the opioid crisis on Cherokee families. Parents who began using the powerful painkillers after a surgery or injury became hooked and were losing custody of their children, babies were being born addicted and young people who ended up in foster care were aging out of the system and becoming addicted themselves, resulting in a generational impact. (Murphy, 2/13)

Medication used to treat opioid use disorder has become cheaper over the last several years, but affordability can still be a problem, depending on a patient's insurance, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open. Experts have called for improved access to medication-assisted treatment like buprenorphine to fight the substance use crisis. But there's uneven access based on cost. (Moreno, 2/13)

In San Francisco, it’s well documented that the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods are experiencing the brunt of the opioid epidemic. But state data shows other Bay Area counties have their own hotspots. Most of the nine counties had a few ZIP codes with a fatal opioid overdose rate several times the county figure, according to the California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard’s 2021 data, the latest year with finalized numbers. (Leonard, 2/10)

To really understand opioid addiction, researcher Ming-Fen Ho is getting down to the cellular level. “If we have a better understanding of biology, then we can develop better drugs to treat the disease,” she said. That's where the tiny bits of brain tissue — nicknamed mini brains — come in. (Richert, 2/14)