A Guardian analysis of autopsy records reveals record-high overdoses in 2023. Harm reduction advocates are fighting to save lives on the streets
Brett Feldman, director of the USC street medicine team, treats unhoused people at their tents and offers harm reduction supplies.Brett Feldman, director of the USC street medicine team, treats unhoused people at their tents and offers harm reduction supplies.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.
Black Angelenos make up only 9% of the county’s overall population, but accounted for 27% of all fentanyl deaths of unhoused people in the last decade.deaths considered sudden, violent or unusual, and where the deceased had not recently been seen by a doctor. But experts say the records provide a representative snapshot of the increasing losses.of deaths of unhoused people, with more rigorous inquiries into victims’ housing status, but hasn’t released 2023 figures.
a 25-year-old woman who had lived there and died two weeks earlier. Hams was nearby when he learned she was unresponsive, but it was too late, he said: “My whole soul was completely crushed. She had a whole life ahead of her.” Hams suspects it was fentanyl, but the cause hasn’t yet been determined. That appeared to be the case with Michael Flores, 55, who had lived in a tent on Aetna Street, but last year was placed in a motel room through a“The pain will never go away,” said his mother, Irma Hayward, 79. Flores, who went by Mike Flo, was her second son to fatally overdose.Flores had long struggled with addiction and mental health challenges. He participated in high school athletics, including wrestling and football, and his mother later worried those activities had damaged his brain.
In the last year, Farias has also been trying hard to avoid fentanyl, but she once accidentally ingested it when it was mixed into something else: “I almost died,” she said, without elaborating. “I don’t want it anywhere near me, ever.” She counted six people she’s known who have died from likely fentanyl overdoses. “I just live day to day,” she sighed, as her own three dogs and two cats ran in circles around her.
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