Spencer Norris

Statewide spending on hotels has more than tripled in recent years. The shift away from shelters has prevented families from accessing services like child…

Some facilities enrolled hardly any patients for treatment — and across prisons, only one in ten treatment recipients was Black.

Hochul’s budget would level off funding for addiction treatment — and use opioid settlement funds to fill the gaps.

In recent years, the distance New Yorkers have to travel for life-saving addiction medication has only gotten longer.

Governor Kathy Hochul has neglected to announce a public emergency over the increasingly deadly opioid epidemic. Observers are perplexed.

The Sheriffs’ Association lobbied against a bill to provide medication for opioid addiction in jails. Since it passed, they’ve failed to evaluate thousands of people for treatment.

Men locked up in the Broome County jail describe an opioid treatment program so shoddy, they risk withdrawal, relapse, and overdose.

While the addiction epidemic gets worse in Albany County, residents want the state’s solutions kept out of their backyards.

Mixed evidence was piling up about a signature New York drug policy experiment. Then the state stopped releasing the data.

In New York’s byzantine residential treatment system, some residents don’t know their rights. Some don’t have any.

Formerly incarcerated “peers” offer drug counseling to people in county jails — when they can get in.

Spencer Norris is an investigative reporter covering homelessness for New York Focus and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. He has exposed deficiencies in opioid treatment in New York’s jails and prisons, as well as a treatment desert spanning most of upstate. Spencer previously worked with the investigations team at the South Florida Sun Sentinel, where their reporting spurred reforms cracking down on sex trafficking and providing new protections for survivors. He earned his master’s degree…

The governor buried policies in her budget proposal that would give police and prosecutors more leverage over people with opioid addictions.