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Even with powerful vaccines in hand and the coronavirus waning across most of the United States, there's still an urgent need for drugs to treat COVID-19 - and that could lay the foundation for the next generation of therapies for pandemics, say Bay Area scientists conducting such research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

San Francisco police arrested five men and seized 16 pounds of fentanyl - enough to kill the city's population four times over - in a narcotics operation in Oakland meant to block deadly drugs from entering the city's Tenderloin neighborhood, authorities said Tuesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In what authorities said was the largest federal seizure of fentanyl in Northern California, more than 40 pounds of the potent and deadly drug was seized and seven people were arrested at two homes in Oakland and San Leandro, the U.S. Attorney's Office announced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

California's COVID-19 death toll could be far higher than current figures suggest, with up to thousands of additional deaths from the disease hiding behind other causes. New research shows that these additional deaths were particularly concentrated in certain parts of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has to be acknowledged that after more than half a century of drug demonization and criminalization, the idea of legalizing substances as powerful and fabled as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms can come off as hallucinatory. That is partly because Americans have become so inured to the prohibition and punishment of drug use, a skewed reality that - despite the growing exception for marijuana - we continue to inhabit in the face of all the evidence that its benefits are imagined and its harms all too actual. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mayor London Breed is proposing a new street team to respond to those who have just overdosed, as San Francisco struggles to curb the city's staggering rise of drug-related deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

San Francisco officials plan to plunge $8 million into a new initiative that will saturate the city's Mid-Market neighborhood with new police officers and unarmed "community ambassadors," a response to what Mayor London Breed called an "unacceptable" level of illegal activity in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A San Francisco Superior Court judge on Friday rejected a request from City Attorney Dennis Herrera to ban four people charged with drug dealing from a roughly 50-square-block area of the Tenderloin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A pair of high school friends from the Bay Area were found guilty Wednesday of stabbing an Italian police officer to death after a botched drug deal during a 2019 vacation in Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Northern California residents turned in 13 tons of expired or unwanted drugs as part of a nationwide campaign known as Take Back Day, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has announced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most people who've interacted with the charismatic, upbeat Gary McCoy as he's climbed San Francisco's political ladder - working for then-Supervisors Scott Wiener and London Breed, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - never would have guessed he nearly died on the city's streets as his drug addiction ravaged his body. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A San Francisco physician was indicted by a federal grand jury this month and charged with injecting patients with fraudulent medicines used to reduce wrinkles, according to authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mayor London Breed, facing yet another deadly month of overdoses in San Francisco, asked for clarity from the Biden administration Wednesday over whether opening a sanctioned drug use site would violate federal law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A man suspected of driving under the influence was killed Tuesday night after he collided with a vehicle driven by a San Mateo sheriff's deputy while fleeing authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Concord police officer on Friday resuscitated a 2-year-old child who had ingested unknown amounts of fentanyl, officials said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The former San Francisco lab tech arrested in Utah after allegedly driving with an evidence bag of methamphetamine and pills will face charges in California as well, San Francisco prosecutors said Thursday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

UCSF and John Hopkins University released a trove of documents Wednesday culled from legal rulings, settlements and ongoing lawsuits related to the nation's opioid crisis, which to date has claimed the lives of nearly 500,000 Americans since 1999. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

San Francisco experienced yet another staggering increase of fatal overdoses last month, a tragic metric that puts 2021 on track to surpass 2020 as the deadliest year in the city's drug epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Santa Rosa police making a routine traffic stop seized a gun hidden under a seated teenage girl, along with drugs and cash. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The San Francisco District Attorney's Office plans to ask City Hall for $2.3 million in funding to create a new task force to tackle the city's fentanyl epidemic after yet another staggering month of overdoses centered in the Tenderloin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Every morning before sunrise, Damian Morffet arrives at San Francisco's most distressing street corner. There, at Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde Street, each dawn looks bleaker than the one before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

California and other states urged a federal appeals court Friday to allow women to obtain abortion pills from their doctors by telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic, challenging the Trump administration's rules that required them to pick up the drug in person - rules left unchanged so far by the Biden administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Federal agents seized a massive amount of narcotics in a coordinated drug bust that is among the largest ever in Northern California, U.S. Attorney David Anderson announced Thursday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher's prints of interlocking lizards, stairs that defy gravity and other impossible but somehow mathematically correct wonders have inspired other artists, scientists and people who like to get high for generations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 14-year-old Guerneville girl found unresponsive in a car driven by an intoxicated teen last month likely died of a fentanyl overdose, Santa Rosa police said Tuesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

San Francisco lost a total of 699 people to overdoses last year, a 59% rise from 2019, according to new data released Thursday by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The much-touted monoclonal antibody treatments that helped President Trump and several members of his administration recover from the coronavirus are sitting idle in many Bay Area hospitals because of staffing, regulatory and logistical problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seven members of a "crime family" in the East Bay were arrested on suspicion of supplying a stream of illegal drugs to the Tenderloin neighborhood, a bust that involved wiretaps, undercover agents and a seizure of 10 pounds of fentanyl, U.S. Attorney David Anderson announced Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SACRAMENTO - California lawmakers are reviving an effort to end mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, proposing to give judges discretion to hand down probation instead of jail time for offenses such as possessing a small amount of heroin for sale and manufacturing methamphetamine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More than 800 resolved criminal prosecutions may have been impacted by a former lab analyst allegedly caught with an evidence bag of methamphetamine in August, according to a list released Friday by the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fifty-eight people died of drug overdoses last month in San Francisco - another tragic string of opioid-related deaths that brought the city's yearly total to 563, according to new data from the chief medical examiner. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More than 800 resolved criminal prosecutions may have been impacted by a former lab analyst allegedly caught with an evidence bag of methamphetamine in August, according to a list released Friday by the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a rare clash between state and local prosecutors, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is challenging a district attorney's murder charge against a drug-using woman who gave birth to a stillborn fetus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two bodies a day continue to arrive at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office, laid to waste by drugs, usually fentanyl. With 516 people dying from overdoses through September, the city might hit 700 deaths by the end of the year, up from 441 last year and 259 the year before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SACRAMENTO - California lawmakers will consider next year whether to allow the use of psychedelic drugs that supporters argue have therapeutic benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Brentwood woman was charged with murder this week in the death of her 2-year-old son, after the toddler allegedly consumed fentanyl that was in her possession, Contra Costa County prosecutors said Thursday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Health monitors recommended Friday that a nationwide trial of the antibody cocktail President Trump claimed was a coronavirus cure be modified and that researchers stop treating severely ill patients with the drug. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A nationwide trial of synthetic antibodies similar to those President Trump touted as "a cure" for the coronavirus was halted this week after it was found to be ineffective, forcing Bay Area researchers to focus on other potential treatments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two bags of drug evidence were missing and several were improperly stored at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office, according to a City Controller report released Thursday that dinged the department for not ensuring "proper handling, tracking and documentation of drug evidence." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bay Area scientists and physicians were troubled Friday by a World Health Organization study that claims the antiviral drug remdesivir does not appear to help hospitalized coronavirus patients. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office, the bodies just keep coming. Roughly two every day. Each one requires yet another autopsy and yet another call to a devastated family with the same terrible message: Your loved one died of a drug overdose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Justin Volk, the forensic lab analyst caught in Utah allegedly driving with an evidence bag of methamphetamine and various pills, has been let go by the San Francisco medical examiner's office. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State Sen. Scott Wiener said Thursday he plans to reintroduce controversial legislation next year that would allow for safe drug-use sites in San Francisco and Oakland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gov. Gavin Newsom's highly publicized executive order banning the sale of new gas-burning cars and trucks in 2035 may be more bark than bite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera says his expanded stay-away orders for suspected drug dealers are no "silver bullet" for ending the open dealing in the Tenderloin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]