Science
The Grand Canyon, a Cathedral to Time, Is Losing Its River
As the planet warms, low snow is starving the river at its headwaters in the Rockies, and higher temperatures are pilfering more of it through evaporation. The seven states that draw on the river are using just about every drop it can provide, and while a wet winter and a recent deal between states have staved off its collapse for now, its long-term health remains in deep doubt.
Our species’ mass migration to the West was premised on the belief that money, engineering and frontier pluck could sustain civilization in a pitilessly dry place. More and more, that belief looks as wispy as a dream.
North Canyon, an ancient tributary.
The Colorado flows so far beneath the Grand Canyon’s rim that many of the four million people who visit the national park each year see it only as a faint thread, glinting in the distance. But the river’s fate matters profoundly for the 280-mile-long canyon and the way future generations will experience it. Our subjugation of the Colorado has already set in motion sweeping shifts to the canyon’s ecosystems and landscapes — shifts that a group of scientists and graduate students from the University of California, Davis, recently set out to see by raft: a slow trip through deep time, at a moment when Earth’s clock seems to be speeding up.
John Weisheit, who helps lead the conservation group Living Rivers, has been rafting on the Colorado for over four decades. Seeing how much the canyon has changed, just in his lifetime, makes him “hugely depressed,” he said. “You know how you feel like when you go to the cemetery? That’s how I feel.”
Still, every year or so, he comes. “Because you need to see an old friend.”
The lands of western North America know well of nature’s cycles of birth and growth and destruction. Eras and epochs ago, this place was a tropical sea, with tentacled, snaillike creatures stalking prey beneath its waves. Then it was a vast sandy desert. Then a sea once again.
At some point, energy from deep inside the Earth started thrusting a huge section of crust skyward and into the path of ancient rivers that crisscrossed the terrain. For tens of millions of years, the crust pushed up and the rivers rolled down, grinding away at the landscape, up, down, up, down. A chasm was cleaved open, which the meandering water joined over time with other canyons, making one. Weather, gravity and plate tectonics warped and sculpted the exposed layers of surrounding stone into fluid, fantastical forms.
The Grand Canyon is a planetary spectacle like none other — one that also happens to host a river that 40 million people rely on for water and power. And the event that crystallized this odd, uneasy duality — that changed nearly everything for the canyon — feels almost small compared with all the geologic upheavals that took place before it: the pouring, 15 miles upstream, of a wall of concrete.
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
Grand Canyon National Park
Lake Mead National Recreation Area
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
Grand Canyon National Park
Lake Mead National Recreation Area
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
Grand Canyon National Park
Lake Mead National Recreation Area
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
Grand Canyon National Park
Lake Mead National Recreation Area
Since 1963, the Glen Canyon Dam has been backing up the Colorado for nearly 200 miles, in the form of America’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell. Engineers constantly evaluate water and electricity needs to decide how much of the river to let through the dam’s works and out the other end, first into the Grand Canyon, then into Lake Mead and, eventually, into fields and homes in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
The dam processes the Colorado’s mercurial flows — a trickle one year and a roaring, spiteful surge the next — into something less extreme on both ends. But for the canyon, regulating the river has come with big environmental costs. And, as the water keeps dwindling, plundered by drought and overuse, these costs could rise.
As recently as a few months ago, the water in Lake Powell was so low that there almost wasn’t enough to turn the dam’s turbines. If it fell past that level in the coming years — and there is every indication that it could — power generation would cease, and the only way water would be released from the dam is through four pipes that sit closer to the bottom of the lake. As the reservoir declined further, the amount of pressure pushing water through these pipes would diminish, meaning smaller and smaller amounts could be discharged out the other end.
North Canyon, and a spring at Vasey’s Paradise.
If the water dropped much more beyond that, the pipes would begin sucking air, and in time Powell would be at “dead pool”: Not a drop would pass through the dam until and unless the water reached the pipes again.
With these doubts about the Colorado’s future in mind, the U.C. Davis scientists rigged up electric-blue inflatable rafts on a cool spring morning. Slate-gray sky, low clouds. Cowboy coffee on a propane burner. At Mile 0 of the Grand Canyon, the river is running at around 7,000 cubic feet per second, rising toward 9,000 — not the lowest flows on record, but far from the highest.
Cubic feet per second can be a little abstract. As the group paddles toward the canyon’s first rapids, Daniel Ostrowski, a master’s student in agronomy at Davis, says it helps to think of basketballs. Lots of them. A regulation basketball fits loosely inside a foot-wide cube. Draw a line across the canyon, and imagine 9,000 basketballs tumbling past it every second.
At Mile 10, the scientists float by a more tangible visual aid. Ages ago, a giant slab of sandstone plunged into the riverbed from the cliffs above, and now it looms over the water like a hulking Cubist elephant. Or at 9,000 basketballs per second it looms. At higher flows — 12,600 basketballs, say — it’s submerged to its knees. At three times that, the water comes up to its head. And at 84,000, which is how much ran through in July 1983, the elephant is all but invisible, a ripple at the river’s surface.
The big problem with low water in the canyon, the one that compounds all others, is that things stop moving. The Colorado is a sort of circulatory system. Its flows carved the canyon but also sustain it, making it amenable to plants, wildlife and boaters. To understand what’s happened since the dam started regulating the river, first consider the smallest things that its water moves, or fails to move.
The Colorado picks up immense amounts of sand and silt charging down the Rockies, but the dam stops basically all of it from continuing into the Grand Canyon. Downstream tributaries, including the Paria and Little Colorado, add some sediment to the river, but not nearly as much as gets trapped in Lake Powell. Plus, when river flows are weak, more sediment settles on the riverbed.
The result is that the canyon’s sandy beaches, where animals live and boaters camp at night, are shrinking. Beaches that were once as wide as freeways are today more like two-lane roads. Others are even scrawnier. The sandy space that remains is also becoming overgrown with vegetation: cattail and brittlebush, arrowweed and seepwillow, bushy tamarisk and spiny camelthorn. Before the dam came in, the river’s springtime floods regularly washed this greenery away.
Loss of silt-laden water is harming the ecosystem.
A lusher, less-barren canyon might not sound like a bad thing. But grasses and shrubs block the wind from blowing sand onto the slopes and terraces, where hundreds of cultural sites preserve the history of the peoples who lived in and around the canyon. Sand shields these sites, which include stone structures, slab-lined granaries and craterlike roasting pits, from weather and the elements. With less sand drifting up from the riverside, the sites are more exposed to erosion and trampling by visitors.
Also, not every place in the canyon is becoming greener. Drought can sap the water that courses within the porous stone walls, water that, where it spurts out, sometimes feeds eye-popping bursts of plant life. Lately, some of these springs, like Vasey’s Paradise at Mile 32, have dried to a dribble for long stretches. But a few bends downriver, the U.C. Davis scientists spot several hanging gardens that, for now, are still thriving.
Besides sand, the Colorado is failing to move larger objects in the canyon. Cobbles and boulders periodically tumble in from hundreds of tributaries and side canyons, often during flash floods, creating bends and rapids in the river. With fewer strong flows to whisk this debris away, more of it is piling up at those bends and rapids. This has made many rapids steeper and narrowed boaters’ paths for navigating them.
Today, when the water is low, more boulders in the river are exposed at certain rapids, making them trickier to negotiate for the 30-to-40-foot-long motor rigs that are popular for canyon tours. In a future of prolonged low flows, tour companies might find it harder to run such large boats safely, cutting off one main way to experience the canyon intimately.
Drought and low water aside, there’s another aspect of the canyon’s future that worries Victor R. Baker, a geologist at the University of Arizona. Dr. Baker has spent four decades exploring alcoves, high ledges and tributary mouths in the Colorado Basin. He scours them for the very particular patterns of sand and silt left by giant floods. The stories they tell are startling.
Mad cascades of water, ones at least as large as any the Grand Canyon experienced in the 20th century, swept through it at least 15 times in the past four and a half millenniums, Dr. Baker and his colleagues have found. Geological evidence upriver from the dam points to 44 large floods of varying sizes there, most of them in the last 500 years.
As the atmosphere warms, allowing it to hold more moisture, the risk of another such deluge could be rising. If one struck when Lake Powell were already flush with melted snow, it could take out the dam, not to mention do considerable work on the canyon.
“I would think the future is going to be one moving toward, as they said in war, long periods of boredom interrupted by short episodes of total, absolute terror,” Dr. Baker said.
None of the government agencies with a hand in managing the canyon can do much about that, not on their own. But they are trying to beat back some of the other forces remaking the canyon from within.
Since 1996, the Bureau of Reclamation, which owns Glen Canyon Dam, has occasionally released blasts of reservoir water to kick up sand from the riverbed and rebuild the canyon’s beaches. The effects are noticeable. But the bureau conducts these “high-flow experiments” only when there’s enough water in Powell to spare. In April, it held its first one in five years.
Redwall Cavern, and the Nankoweap granaries, built 1,000 years ago.
The National Park Service works to preserve the Grand Canyon’s archaeological sites against erosion, even if that means leaving them swaddled in sand, where nobody sees them. “Those cultural resources that are covered by the sand are well suited by being covered by the sand,” said Ed Keable, the park’s superintendent.
Other issues, though, are so entrenched that addressing them just creates other problems. Take the spread of tamarisk, an invasive treelike shrub that has displaced native vegetation in the canyon and around other Western rivers. About two decades ago, officials decided to fight back by releasing beetles that loved eating tamarisk leaves. But the beetles loved those leaves so much, and their numbers grew so quickly, that they began threatening the Southwestern willow flycatcher, an endangered bird that nests in tamarisk.
There is a similar no-win feeling to the bigger question of how to keep the Colorado useful to everyone as it shrivels. The dam is the root cause of the canyon’s environmental shifts, which also include big changes to fish populations. But simply allowing the river to flow more naturally through the existing dam, so water is stored primarily in Lake Mead instead of in both Mead and Powell, wouldn’t reverse the shifts entirely.
Jack Schmidt, the director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, has concluded that the only way to allow sufficiently large amounts of sediment-rich water back into the canyon, short of dynamiting the dam, would be to drill new diversion tunnels into the sandstone around it. That would be costly, and require careful planning to dampen the immediate ecological effects.
“Like everything else in that damn river system,” Dr. Schmidt said, “there’s a consequence to everything.”
It’s the U.C. Davis scientists’ sixth night on the Colorado, and it comes after several numbing hours of paddling against the wind. As the sun touches the canyon walls with the day’s last glimmers of orange and gold, the graduate students sit in camp chairs chewing over what they’ve seen.
They are preparing for careers as academics and experts and policymakers, people who will shape how we live with the environmental fallout of past choices. Choices like damming rivers. Like building cities in floodplains. Like running economies on fossil fuels. Once, those were first-rate answers to society’s needs. Now they require answers of their own — a whole wearying cascade of problems prompting solutions that create more problems.
“It becomes overwhelming,” says Alma Wilcox, a master’s student in environmental policy, sitting by a scraggly, haunted-looking grove of tamarisk. It helps, she says, to focus: “Having control over a really small aspect of it is empowering.”
The basement rocks: dark schist and pink granite.
Yara Pasner, a doctoral student in hydrology, says she feels a duty to make sure the load on future generations is lessened, even if, or perhaps because, our forebears didn’t do us that courtesy. “There’s been a mentality that we will mess this up and the future generation will have more tools to fix this.” Instead, she says, we’ve found that the consequences of many past decisions are harder to cope with than expected.
The next morning, the group floats into the realm of the canyon’s oldest rocks. Almost two billion years ago, islands in the primordial sea crashed into the landmass that would become North America. The unimaginable heat and pressure from the collision cooked the rocks and sediment on the seafloor into layers of inky, shiny rock. This rock then lay buried beneath mountains that were formed in the collision, becoming squished and folded to create the otherworldly masses flanking the river today, which resemble nothing so much as freshly churned ice cream: dark gray schist swirled with salmon-pink granite.
But the mountains that sat above them? Those are all but gone, ground down over eons, their remnants long since scattered and recombined into new mountains, new formations.
“There were the Himalayas on top of this,” says Nicholas Pinter, the Davis geologist who has helped lead this expedition, gesturing from the end of a raft at Mile 78. “And it’s eroded,” he says. “Worn to an almost infinitesimally flat plane, before it all begins again.”
Somewhere in among those grand happenings — within the tiniest, most insignificant-seeming snatches of geologic time — is the world we live in, the one we have.
Map by Elena Shao.
Produced by Sarah Graham, Matt McCann, Claire O’Neill, Jesse Pesta and Eden Weingart. Audio produced by Kate Winslett.
Additional expert sources: Ryan S. Crow, John Dillon, Ben Dove, Elizabeth Grant, Reed Kenny, Brandon Lake, Tom Martin, Abel O. Nelson, Joel B. Sankey, John Toner, Robert H. Webb, Brian Williamshen and Greg Yarris.
You feel a cold coming on, or maybe it’s already upon you: the telltale cough, sore throat and stuffy head. You swing by the drugstore, where a shelf full of over-the-counter products containing the mineral zinc claim to be able to shorten the duration of your symptoms.
The promise of relief is tempting. But is it one these products can make good on?
A new analysis of studies published on zinc and cold viruses concludes that there isn’t enough evidence to say whether over-the-counter zinc treatments have any effect on preventing the common cold.
For those who pop lozenges or inhale nasal sprays once a cold has come on, the available research together indicates that the products may reduce the duration of symptoms by up to two days, said Daryl Nault, an assistant professor at Maryland University of Integrative Health and first author of the paper, published Wednesday by the nonprofit organization Cochrane.
But those studies are so inconsistent in terms of the dosage, type of zinc, patient population and definition of cold symptoms that “confidence in the evidence is mostly low to very low,” the review states. “It is likely that additional studies are required before any firm conclusions can be drawn.”
In other words: Nearly 30 years after zinc lozenges first hit the market, we still can’t say for sure if these things do what they say they do.
“We aren’t saying [zinc] does” have any effect on the common cold, Nault said. “We aren’t saying it doesn’t. We’re saying we need more consistent evidence that is replicable. That’s a cornerstone of good science.”
The age of zinc cold products dawned in 1996, when researchers from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation convinced 100 clinic employees to volunteer as research subjects within 24 hours of developing a cold.
Half were given placebos, and half were given lozenges containing 13.3 milligrams of zinc from zinc gluconate every two waking hours as long as their symptoms persisted. Those receiving the zinc got better after 4.4 days on average, while the placebo group felt sick for an average of 7.6 days.
Most people consume a sufficient amount of zinc, a vital nutrient, through a regular diet. The mineral is plentiful in red meat and poultry, and present in many grains and fruits. (Oysters contain more zinc per serving than any other known food, with a single serving containing nearly 300% of the daily recommended intake.)
Scientists aren’t exactly sure how the mineral works to alleviate cold symptoms. But the idea of an over-the-counter way to shorten the misery of a common cold has proved wildly popular.
Total U.S. sales of zinc products, such as Zicam and Cold-Eeze, were $340 million in 2023, said Hannah Esper, managing editor of the trade publication Nutrition Business Journal. Demand for zinc and other supplements exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, with sales for zinc growing 168.3% during 2020.
Based in the U.K., Cochrane uses rigorous research methods to evaluate existing scientific evidence and produce reports to help people make decisions about their health, according to its website.
For this review, the Cochrane team looked at 34 studies conducted across 13 countries that examined zinc products and the treatment or prevention of the common cold.
Drawing strong conclusions from the available research is difficult, as the studies tend to measure different things, said author Susan Wieland, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and director of the Cochrane Complementary Medicine Field.
The cold “is a very common condition that is a difficult one to study,” Wieland said. It comes and goes quickly, making it difficult to enroll research subjects. Dosages and the type of zinc administered to study subjects varied widely.
“The designs of each study are different. So different dosages, different dosage forms, different patient populations, different criteria of exclusion and inclusion, different outcomes [and] definitions of cold,” said Dr. Jason Yee, an antimicrobial stewardship pharmacist at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles who was not involved with the review. “It’s really hard to draw the same conclusion based on different studies.”
Physicians said they weren’t surprised by the findings.
“I agree with the study. … It is consistent with my clinical experience in the hospital,” said Dr. Samia Faiz, an internal medicine specialist at UC Riverside Health. “In general, healthy people may be able to take zinc supplements if they make them feel better or if they get some comfort. They should not take these supplements if they have distaste or stomach upset.”
While over-the-counter zinc products are generally harmless to patients battling colds, said Dr. Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease physician and researcher at the Mayo Clinic, popping lozenges “shouldn’t come at the expense of doing things that really matter, which is getting plenty of rest, plenty of fluids and taking care of yourself.”
So why do we continue to fork over our cash for these things when we don’t really have more than a hunch that they work?
When a cold hits, “it’s natural for consumers to just reach for anything that may help alleviate those symptoms. But average consumers aren’t really educated on the literature and studies that are out there showing that there’s limited evidence and efficacy with these products,” Yee said.
Buying the lozenges or huffing the nasal spray can make us feel like we have more agency in a situation where we’re at the mercy of time and our immune systems, Nault said.
“Having a sense of control makes a lot of people feel better, and feel like they’re doing something,” Nault said. “Even if they aren’t.”
Times researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
Fake versions of Botox have popped up in California, raising alarm among public health officials who warn that counterfeit versions of the injections can lead to symptoms such as slurred speech and breathing problems.
“Counterfeit or incorrectly administered Botox, even in small amounts, can result in serious health problems and even death,” Dr. Tomás J. Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health, warned in a statement Wednesday.
Botox, or botulinum toxin, is used cosmetically to temporarily smooth fine lines on the face. It has also been employed to treat medical conditions such as muscle spasms. The product is derived from a toxin produced by bacteria.
Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that 22 people from 11 states had reported harmful reactions such as weakness and blurry vision after getting injections, landing some of them in the hospital. They had gotten their injections from unlicensed or untrained people or outside of healthcare settings, such as in a home or spa, according to the federal agency.
So far, there is no indication that such problems were linked to the genuine Botox product approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration, health officials said. Instead, regulators have found that some patients received counterfeit Botox products or ones from unverified sources. Investigations are underway.
“We’re not even sure what it really is,” but it’s not Botox, said Dr. Adam Friedman, chair of dermatology at George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
And “when you have an injectable agent that is not what it claims to be, has no quality assurance, no oversight … there could be a whole bunch of different things that come along for the ride,” including bacteria or allergens.
Because the health effects could be delayed, “I don’t think we’ve actually scratched the surface yet” of possible consequences from injecting an unknown substance into the body, Friedman said.
The California Department of Public Health said that since a multistate investigation launched in November, it had received two reports of harmful reactions to counterfeit or mishandled botulinum toxin, which were included in the total figure reported nationally by the CDC.
Under California law, Botox can be injected only by a physician, or by a registered nurse or physician assistant working under the supervision of a doctor. But state law “does not restrict where Botox treatments may be performed,” according to the Medical Board of California. In a statement, Aragón urged people to get Botox injections only from “licensed and trained professionals in healthcare settings.”
Public health officials also advised consumers to check with healthcare providers that they were getting Botox from “an authorized source” and to ask if they were licensed and trained to administer the injections.
“If in doubt, do not get the injection,” the public health department urged.
Aragón also stressed that Botox should never be purchased online or through “unlicensed individuals.” Dr. Debra Johnson, former president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said that online sellers abroad have been creating “pirated Botox,” putting it in similar packaging, and then selling it to anyone who will pay.
Physicians have been getting emails and faxes saying, “‘We’ve got Botox for cheaper, we’ve got filler for cheaper’ — and it’s all these unregulated places that don’t have any FDA oversight,” Johnson said. Responsible doctors know that’s illegal, she said, but “I’m sure there’s some people who would hop at the chance.”
Botox is manufactured by AbbVie Inc. The California Department of Public Health said that outer cartons of the genuine product include product descriptions for either “BOTOX® COSMETIC / onabotulinumtoxinA / for Injection” or “OnabotulinumtoxinA / BOTOX® / for injection” and list the manufacturer as either “Allergan Aesthetics / An AbbVie Company” or “abbvie.” They also list the active ingredient as “OnabotulinumtoxinA.”
Fake products might show the active ingredient as “Botulinum Toxin Type A,” include languages other than English, or indicate 150-unit doses, according to the California Department of Public Health. (AbbVie manufactures real Botox products in 50-, 100- and 200-unit dose forms, federal officials said.) Another tipoff to a fake product is the lot number “C3709C3” on packaging or vials, regulators have advised.
Thankfully, “there’s some really key, distinct features on this fake Botox that distinguish it from the real thing, which has not been contaminated,” Friedman said. If a consumer is concerned, “there’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘Hey, can I check out the box?’”
In general, if “something seems to be too good to be true” or “it seems like a bargain when it comes to your health, those should be signals to run,” he said.
Anyone suffering symptoms from counterfeit Botox — which are similar to the effects of botulism poisoning from improperly canned foods — should contact a medical professional or go immediately to an emergency room, CDPH said. Symptoms can include drooping eyelids, trouble swallowing, fatigue, weakness and difficulty breathing.
Fake Botox products can be reported to the FDA through its website or by calling (800) 551-3989. In California, people can also tip off the California Department of Public Health by submitting a consumer complaint.
Year after year, Los Angeles County has seen devastating losses on its streets, as homeless people bedding down in tents, under tarps and on sidewalks have lost their lives to drug overdoses at soaring rates.
Now a newly released report shows the death rate from overdoses stopped rising among unhoused people in the county in 2022 — the same year L.A. County was stepping up its efforts to save lives.
Public health officials welcomed the news as a glint of hope, but cautioned it is too soon to say if the numbers are headed for a lasting downturn. They pointed to a county push to dramatically ramp up the distribution of naloxone — a medicine that bystanders can use to stop opioid overdoses — as a likely factor.
In their report, county officials touted a “near doubling” that year in the reported number of overdoses that were thwarted with naloxone, based on figures provided by a county program. The lifesaving medicine is commonly sold as a nasal spray under the brand name Narcan.
Two years ago in North Hollywood, Manny Placeres told The Times he had revived people seven times using Narcan that had been provided to him by a county team, honing his technique with time.
“As they’re knocking on heaven’s door, I pull them back,” Placeres said.
Manny Placeres, who has administered naloxone many times to reverse opioid overdoses on the streets, embraces Leimer in 2022.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The L.A. County Department of Health Services has handed out Narcan at homeless encampments, given it to community groups and county agencies and set up vending machines to dispense it for free to people leaving county jails.
As of February, the health services department said it had distributed more than 600,000 doses of naloxone since launching its initiative, resulting in more than 25,000 overdoses being stopped. Community groups and syringe programs have bolstered such efforts by handing out their own supplies of free naloxone provided by the state.
Dr. Gary Tsai, director of the public health department’s substance abuse prevention and control bureau, said that after years of alarming increases, “it is encouraging to see a slowing of this leading cause of death for people experiencing homelessness.”
“Efforts to increase access to naloxone and overdose prevention services have undoubtedly helped to bend this curve and provide a blueprint for reducing drug-related fatalities in this very high-risk population,” he said in a statement.
County officials said such efforts had also helped stabilize the death rate for homeless people overall after years of disturbing growth. As deadly overdoses stopped surging and COVID-19 deaths plunged, the overall mortality rate among unhoused people in L.A. County began to level off, the report found.
But homeless people remained far more likely than other county residents to die in a range of ways, including overdoses, traffic collisions, heart disease and homicide.
Their death rate overall was nearly four times higher than that of the broader population — a gap that has widened over time, public health officials found. And although it may have finally hit a plateau, the mortality rate for homeless people in L.A. County was still 60% higher than it had been three years earlier.
“This report highlights the continued need for concerted efforts to reduce the disproportionate burden of mortality among this vulnerable population,” L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement.
The county report also pointed out some alarming variations in the overall trends in L.A. County: For Black people who were unhoused, for instance, the rate of overdose deaths continued to rise significantly in 2022.
The rate of fatal overdoses also kept rising among homeless people in their 20s and 40s, the report found. That was offset by dropping rates among older people, but the report raised a grim possibility: After so many deadly years, “there may now be fewer surviving fentanyl and other opioid users over 50.”
Narcan can stop overdoses from opioids such as fentanyl, a powerful synthetic drug that has been involved in a rising share of overdose deaths among homeless people in L.A. County.
But fentanyl has not been the only threat: Roughly two-thirds of deadly overdoses among unhoused people involved more than one drug. Among the most commonly mingled were fentanyl and methamphetamine, a combination involved in nearly half of overdose deaths among homeless people in the county in 2022, according to the new report.
L.A. County public health officials called for a number of steps to bring down deaths among unhoused people, including expanding housing options so that people who use drugs will not lose their housing as a result; handing out more naloxone and test strips that detect fentanyl; and expanding preventative care for people who are homeless.
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