Banks tend to be very good at alerting you to potential credit card fraud. Can drug tracking programs do as good a job at flagging risky prescription scenarios?
Mental Health & Trauma
When Erin Borrego was 15, she and her classmates started experimenting with opioid painkillers. It started with pills called Percocet and Lortab, but she quickly moved on to injecting heroin.
If there’s any police department that understands what an opioid epidemic means for a community, it’s New Mexico's Española Police Department. Even the chief of police has had addiction struggles within his own family.
KUNM’s Ed Williams has been investigating the impacts of heroin addiction on children and families in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. The area has had one of the country’s highest overdose rates for decades. Here he takes a deep look at the issue in an hour-long radio documentary.
When kids are at high risk for addiction, a good public school system can be one of the most effective ways to prevent drug use. In Española public schools, teacher turnover and administrative problems have instead created instability for students.
Research shows early childhood education is one of the most effective ways to prevent drug use later in life. That’s especially important in New Mexico's Rio Arriba County, where an opioid epidemic has been raging for decades.
Española, New Mexico, has had one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the country for decades. It’s a public health crisis that can create particular challenges for pregnant moms and their doctors.
Crocker College Prep is one of five New Orleans schools in a program to better serve children who've been exposed to trauma. WWNO’s Eve Troeh profiles Crocker’s new principal to understand how the school’s approach differs.
In WWNO's ongoing series on how New Orleans kids deal with levels of trauma many times higher the national average, we hear the story of 13-year-old Sherlae, whose tumultuous home life left her struggling at school.
The number of babies born with opioids in their system has risen dramatically in recent years. That's particularly worrying in light of new research that found such children perform significantly worse in school than their peers.