BALTIMORE — Just over a week after a mass overdose in Baltimore, emergency responders returned to the Penn North neighborhood after receiving several 911 calls about another "spate of overdoses."
"Several of our officers issued Narcan to individuals who were experiencing the overdose," Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said during a Friday press conference. "We also have numerous officers working in the area and have been working in the area, attempting to locate who the buyers were, the sellers were, and mainly who's bringing the drugs."
Friday morning around 9 a.m., seven people in the area of Penn North were suffering from overdose-related symptoms. Five were taken to the hospital in serious condition; two refused treatment.
Hear Baltimore City officials give an update into Penn North mass overdose
This comes just eight days after 27 people were sent to the hospital in a mass overdose event in this same area. Many of the patients were in critical condition; no deaths have been officially reported.
"At this point, the difference between this morning and last week, the call volume for us doesn't appear as concentrated as what it was last week," Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said. "We are still working in this area. There seems to be more of a radius style of calls that are happening in this area."
"BPD is working to determine the source of the drugs," Mayor Brandon Scott during the press conference," When we find the people, not if, when we find the people responsible, they will be removed from the streets of Baltimore."
On Thursday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released results of lab testing it performed on drug residue samples. NIST has a program called RaDAR, or Rapid Drug Analysis and Research. The program started in Maryland in 2021. RaDAR orks with state and local public health and law enforcement partners to monitor the chemical makeup of the illicit drug landscape in near-real time, according to a NIST spokesperson.
"Public health partners send drug residue samples to NIST, where we use advanced technology to identify as many of the drugs, cutting agents, and adulterants in the sample as possible, including new or unexpected compounds that may indicate an emerging threat," the spokesperson told WMAR-2 News. "The goal is to provide public health and law enforcement authorities the high-quality, accurate information they need to address the opioid crisis and to respond more quickly to emerging threats."
It was widely reported that the results found a combination of substances already common in Maryland's illegal drug supply - including fentanyl - in addition to a new one, a benzodiazepine derivative with sedative properties, called n-methylclonazepam.
But later on Thursday, the federal agency seemed to walk back its initial claim that these samples were definitively tied to the overdoses on July 10, saying in a statement to WMAR-2 News:
"NIST would like to clarify the information it released on July 17, 2025, which indicated certainty in the connection between drug residue samples it tested and the July 10 overdose incident. NIST is confident in the results of its testing. However, NIST’s role does not include establishing a connection between the samples it receives and any particular incident. The Baltimore Police Department is conducting an investigation into that incident. NIST is not involved in that investigation."
BPD also put out a statement saying they "cannot independently verify the origin, time or circumstances under which these particular samples were collected or sourced."
BPD's crime lab did their own testing and their results were slightly different from NIST's, but Mayor Scott said they won't release those results publicly right now.
"We have to make sure that we hold those people responsible and we will release information as we can, but we will do nothing, nothing that will maybe disrupt or interrupt that investigation," Scott told reporters.
Commissioner Worley says police are going to treat the two overdose incidents from July 10 and July 18 as separate investigations until and unless they can prove that they're related.
"Today's incident is a painful reminder that our work is far from over," Mayor Scott said Friday. "For as far as we've come, we have even that far to go, but we're committed to working to ending this crisis for good, no matter what it takes."
Despite ongoing outreach efforts some people in this neighborhood remain unconvinced by the mayor's message that this help isn't going anywhere.
"We need help out here," Murisha Gupton told WMAR-2 News. "So how did it have to take for people to OD and die for all for all this to happen? We need help. Baltimore City need help."
Mayor Scott responded to residents' concerns during Friday's press conference, saying: "I understand the frustrations because you're talking about a neighborhood, as I said to you to you all yesterday that it's been so disinvested in for so long, literally since Billie Holiday walked up and down Pennsylvania Avenue that we we're not going to change all of that overnight, and I understand the frustration. My responsibility is to make sure that we're doing better than was done in the past and do everything in my power."
