On the April edition of Healthwatch, with Dr. Leana Wen: 

Dr. Wen discusses the city's first Stabilizatoin Center, cuts to the city's teen pregnancy prevention programs, and a new initiative to reduce falls among senior citizens. She answers our questions for the hour, and takes your calls, emails and tweets about your public health concerns.

Listen to the program.

Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen added her voice to the chorus warning about the dangers of synthetic marijuana after four people in the state this month were hospitalized for extreme bleeding after taking the drugs.

Wen said the drugs are often marketed as natural but contain untested chemical compounds that can harm or kill. People who use synthetic marijuana play “Russian Roulette” because they don’t know what they are taking, Wen said in a statement.

Read the entire story.

An op-ed by Evan Behrle, Special Advisor for Opioid Policy at the Health Department and Dr. Leana S. Wen, Baltimore City Health Commissioner:

In Baltimore, we spend a lot of time training people to use naloxone, the antidote medication that reverses an opioid overdose. At these trainings, we talk about the opioid epidemic — what caused it and how it escalated so quickly. These explanations are often unnecessary. Our city’s residents know the opioid epidemic. It has taken people they loved.

Read the entire op-ed.

With drug overdose deaths ravaging communities across the country, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are planning to introduce legislation Wednesday that would require $10 billion a year in federal funding to combat the opioid crisis. 

Cummings said he and Warren got the idea to fund a massive public health campaign against opioids from Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen and her staff, who pitched the lawmakers on the need for increased funding.

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