Attorney general coming here to discuss opioids, crime

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be in town Monday to discuss efforts by law enforcement and federal prosecutors to combat the opioid crisis and address an uptick in violent crime in some communities.

Mr. Sessions will deliver remarks at 3 p.m. in the jury assembly room of the U.S. courthouse on Grant Street. He will not be taking questions. The event is not open to the public.

Mr. Sessions has said the opioid epidemic is the worst drug crisis in American history and has taken steps to fight it nationally, especially in Appalachia and Western Pennsylvania.

Most recently, he announced the creation of an FBI task force in Pittsburgh funded with $100,000 a year to target violent crime, particularly drug-related armed robberies, in Allegheny and Beaver counties.

The money, allocated as part of the Justice Department’s long-running Project Safe Neighborhoods, will be used to add local police to an FBI squad working out of the Pittsburgh field office, which has jurisdiction over Western Pennsylvania and all of West Virginia.

Mr. Sessions also recently revamped the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, creating a DEA division in Kentucky to combat opioid trafficking in Appalachia, where overdoses are the highest in the United States. That region includes West Virginia. The plan also called for the appointment of opioid coordinators for all federal districts and $12 million in funding for state and local police.

In October, a Pittsburgharea doctor also became the first person in the nation charged since Mr. Sessions announced the formation in the summer of the Opioid and Abuse Detection Unit, a Justice Department initiative that uses data to target physicians and other health care providers who are contributing to opioid abuse in 12 districts across the U.S.

Pittsburgh is among the 12.

Dr. Andrzej Zielke, 62, of Hampton, who had operated Medical Frontiers in the Richland Mall, is under indictment on charges of running a pill mill. Federal agents, who had been investigating Dr. Zielke since 2014, said he was doling out prescriptions to addicts for cash, including at least one who died of an overdose.