The death of a man this week in East Alton potentially is the 22nd fatal heroin overdose of 2011, a number four times greater than what Madison County saw just four years ago, the coroner said Tuesday. “In 2008, we had five cases; in 2009, seven; in 2010, 18,” Coroner Stephen Nonn said. “There is definitely a problem here. We’re not even halfway through the year.” An autopsy was conducted Tuesday on Jessie S. Outhouse, 29, who died at his home in the 200 block of Westwood Place in East Alton; his body was found Monday. Results of the toxicology tests will not be known for several weeks, but if they bear out, the...

A top agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says St. Louis is among the “hot spots” nationally in a growing fight against heroin. Michael Kress, a supervisory special agent with the DEA, says the drug is flourishing here thanks to an entrenched network of drug dealers in the St. Louis area.   “The St. Louis metropolitan area seems to be really getting hit hard,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “Heroin trafficking organizations in this area, the St. Louis area, are bringing in higher quantities and purities of the heroin.”   And that’s where the economics of this heroin explosion begin. Because the heroin...

 Drug addiction investigators with joint appointments at Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, along with MediciNova, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, have reported preliminary results of the company’s neurological drug candidate, ibudilast(MN-166/AV411), in a Phase 1b/2a trial in opioid addicts. As there are no non-opioid drugs approved for treatment of dependence to opioids or methamphetamine, ibudilast is one of the few known new-approach treatments being investigated clinically.  Largely funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) with MediciNova supplementation,...

Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have developed a highly successful vaccine against a heroin high and have proven its therapeutic potential in animal models. The new study, published recently online ahead of print by the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, demonstrates how a novel vaccine produces antibodies (a kind of immune molecule) that stop not only heroin but also other psychoactive compounds metabolized from heroin from reaching the brain to produce euphoric effects. “In my 25 years of making drug-of-abuse vaccines, I haven’t seen such a strong immune response as I have with...

 Heroin use is rising in St. Louis suburbs, and it’s becoming the drug of choice. According to officials, heroin-related overdoses and deaths have spiked from last year. In Madison County, Ill. the number of deaths caused by the drug have doubled since 2010. After three men from Granite City Tuesday were found dealing the drug, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced it will start investigating heroin overdoses as an attempted homicide. Anyone who is caught distributing the drug to someone who overdoses could face a minimum of 20 years in prison. The maximum sentence would be life in prison. The three suspects from Granite City caught...