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The Food and Drug Administration plans new steps to combat the abuse of opioid painkillers, ranging from new dosage forms to small-quantity packaging and new research requirements on drugmakers. The new FDA measures are a further effort to stem the opioid-addiction crisis that has led to an estimated 47,000 opioid-painkiller overdose deaths in 2017 alone. The agency plans for the first time to require makers of opioid pain pills to conduct long-term studies of their drugs’ long-term effectiveness. The FDA has long mandated studies about safety, but the testing for possible long-term loss of effectiveness is a new authority for the agency in a law passed by Congress last fall. (Burton, 2/26)

The Harm Reduction Commission, at its seventh and final meeting, agreed on language explicitly calling for pilot sites where people can consume illegal drugs in hygienic surroundings with trained staff who can revive those who overdose. The report also specifies that any such site should receive local approval and calls for “rigorous evaluation and data gathering” to measure its effectiveness, but provides no suggestions on where such centers would be located. (Freyer, 2/26)

San Francisco is receiving a $3 million state grant to expand badly needed mental health and substance abuse services for homeless people over the coming 18 months. The grant from the California Department of Health Care Services will fund a range of outreach, social work and case management expansions aimed at shepherding intensively troubled homeless people into programs that will help them get off the streets and into healthy, housed lives. (Fagan, 2/26)

Helping students do better in school, get punished less often and miss fewer days are all things the administration is hoping for — which is why Gov. Tim Walz is asking for more than $4 million a year for children's mental health care in his budget proposal. One piece of that is to offer mental health care in school for as many as 7,500 more students through the state's "school-linked" mental health services. (Roth, 2/26)

A team of researchers at Stanford University are scanning the brains of stimulant users like Dee Dee to better understand one of the most intractable and frustrating questions in addiction treatment: Who is most likely to relapse and why? Current studies show that 60 percent of people in rehab for meth addiction relapse within a year of discharge, a stat that has health officials on edge as meth use in San Francisco is again surging. (Dembosky, 2/26)