Feds take aim at local drug gangs

The feds are targeting The Bronx and Buffalo as part of a new multicity attack on drug-related violence and overdoses, authorities announced Monday.

The two cities — as well as Newark and Camden, NJ — are among 34 locations in 23 states that will be part of “Operation Overdrive,” an initiative launched by the Drug Enforcement Administration Feb. 1.

The DEA said it will use “a data-driven, intelligence-led approach to identify and dismantle criminal drug networks operating in areas with the highest rates of violence and overdoses.”

“The consequences of drug trafficking have become evidently clear in New York,” DEA Agent Timothy Foley said.

The effort is designed to address the 275 people who are dying every day from overdoses, the feds said. Drug ODs took the lives of a record-breaking 103,000 people in the US from April 2020 to April 2021.

The 12-month span between April 2019 and April 2020 held the previous record of most overdose deaths, or 93,000.

Injection sites

During his last months in office, former Mayor Bill de Blasio opened the country’s first “safe injection” sites in Harlem and Washington Heights, which allow those suffering from substance-use disorders to take drugs under supervised care.

The city claims that more than 110 overdoses were averted or reversed in the sites’ first six weeks of operation.

Hiawatha Collins, a community manager at the National Harm Reduction Coalition, which works to find more holistic solutions to the drug crisis, said it’s those kinds of initiatives that will make a difference.

“The DEA is not the solution to the overdose crisis in my community,” Collins, who lives in The Bronx, told The Post.

Collins says the community needs more money “in evidence-based harm-reduction practices we know work, like improving access to naloxone and syringes, safer supply and consumption spaces.”