Addiction & Recovery 9.14.25 - Flipbook - Page 14
14 A Special Advertising Section of Baltimore Sun Media Group | Sunday, September 14, 2025
Education Remains Crucial to
Combat Drug Use in Baltimore
Bad batches continue to plague Baltimore City
By Linda L. Esterson, Contributing Writer
A
mass overdose event in
the Penn North area of
Baltimore City on July 10
landed 27 people in several area hospitals. A week later, a second event resulted in five additional
hospitalizations. While neither event
was reported to yield fatalities, the
crisis level continues to concern area
health officials.
With no officially reported results of the investigations into these
events, area experts are attributing
the trauma level scenarios to “bad
batches” of drugs on the street. Bad
batches refer to any type of street
drug that is more potent and contains unexpected and dangerous
ingredients, according to Nicole P.
Wagner, Ph.D., M.H.S., B.S., R.P.S.,
CCDP, CSC-AD, a recovery peer
supervisor with LifeBridge Health.
She supports Grace Medical Center,
Sinai Hospital and Northwest Hospital, with a caseload at Sinai Hospital Addiction Recovery Program and
the New Hope Treatment Center.
Street drugs are often “laced,”
meaning they are mixed with other
drugs or toxic substances, making
them substantially more dangerous. These can include unexpected
chemicals like antifreeze, coolant,
bath salts, gasoline and diesel fluid,
or opioids like fentanyl, benzodiazepines, a class of depressant drugs
that are tranquilizers or sedatives,
or histamines, Wagner states. The
different substances can attack the
body in different ways, eating internal organs and the skin with lethal
results.
How the user takes the drug is
based on preference as they can
smoke, snort or inject into their
veins to achieve the high, she says.
Government departments like the
police force and entities like the
Maryland Syringe Services Program
are testing drugs and paraphernalia
they find following overdose events
to get a handle on their components.
Tester strips have evaluated samples
from the July 10 event and other incidents from April through June and
found an increase in sedatives (xylazine, medetomidine and benzodiazepines) in the drug supply, explains
Candy Kerr, communications manager for the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition.
“We have been handing out fentanyl and xylazine tester strips for
a while, and we need to be handing
out benzodiazepine strips as well,”
she says.
But some substances are immune
to the strips, and while determining
components provides data, this process is implemented after use. Removing these bad batches from the
streets entirely would do more to
protect the health of citizens.
“Stemming the tide of bad batches is a hard feat,” notes Kerr. “Drug
busts don’t actually help as the disturbance of the supply forces people
to seek their supply elsewhere which
can lead to overdose.”
July 10 was officially labeled a
Level 1 event, raising even more
awareness to the issue and the identified hot zones – Penn North as well
as Carroll Park in the Washington
Village-Pigtown neighborhood area
– where repeat users end up in emergency departments. “A lot of addicts
hang out there especially at sundown where they can at least find
somewhere to sleep or to use drugs,”
Wagner explains.
They also find abandoned buildings where they stay and use often
without repercussion. This trend
dates back to the 1990s, according
to Wager, but also results in overdose
