Photo: Dr. Jennifer Pierce with an Anchorage Fire Department vehicle on January 9, 2026. Pierce and the vehicle are part of a new program that will offer addiction treatment to those who overdose. (Matt Faubion / Alaska Public Media)

Alaska is launching pilot programs in Anchorage and Juneau to offer addiction treatment in mobile care units.

Emergency responders will give people medication to help them survive after an overdose.

Indigenous Alaskans die of overdose at about three times the rate of white Alaskans.

Alaska Public Media’s health reporter Rachel Cassandra has more.

Dr. Jennifer Pierce shows off a new SUV for the Anchorage fire department’s pilot program.

“We want people to see us as a beacon of help.”

Pierce has a simple mission: to treat Anchorage residents who overdose and connect them with care afterwards.

For the first time in a mobile unit in Alaska, responders can give patients the medication buprenorphine, which reduces withdrawals and can get patients on the road to recovery.

“We don’t want people to fall through the cracks.”

Narcan, or naloxone, is used to reverse overdoses, but it puts people into withdrawal. And research shows that offering that second medication, buprenorphine, makes it more likely patients will enter long-term recovery. But Pierce says even if people don’t continue treatment, the medication reduces the risk of a second overdose in the days immediately following – a dangerous window, according to research.

She hopes the program saves lives.

“Even if it’s just one life. Right? We’re saving lives out there and preventing individuals, maybe from overdosing the next day or overdosing again later and dying.”

Pierce visited successful programs in Texas and Washington for ideas and best practices to replicate in Alaska.

Dr. Quigley Peterson says he’s also seen the healing benefits of buprenorphine. He’s an emergency room physician heading Juneau’s mobile pilot program.

He says he’s confident it will do well partly because he’s seen how helpful the medication can be in the emergency room.

“We have something that can help engage people, that’s super safe and it’s cheap, and that it works.”

He says they’ll collect data over the year to see what happens to patients after they’re given buprenorphine for an overdose. His hope is that it reduces emergency room visits and calls for emergency medical care. If the pilots are successful, Peterson’s goal is to inspire similar programs in more communities across Alaska.

Three-year-old Karson Apodaca. (Courtesy Sayetsitty Family / GoFundMe)

A Navajo man was facing the tribe’s criminal justice system after allegedly driving drunk and killing a three-year-old boy at a Christmas parade on the reservation.

As KJZZ’s Gabriel Pietrorazio reports, U.S. authorities are now stepping in to prosecute him in federal court.

67-year-old Stanley Begay Jr. was charged with vehicular manslaughter and could have faced up to a year in prison and a $500,000 fine. 

Now a grand jury in Arizona is handing him three counts, including second-degree murder, stemming from the death of three-year-old Karson Apodoca.

Begay was taken into federal custody by FBI agents last week.

The agency’s Phoenix Field Office is seeking photos and videos from that incident that can be used in the case against Begay, who has been assigned a Flagstaff attorney.

Dignity of Earth and Sky is a sculpture on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River near Chamberlain, S.D. (Courtesy SDPB)

Following the 2026 State of the Tribes address in South Dakota, Gov. Larry Rhoden (R-SD) met with over 50 dignitaries from eight of the state’s nine tribes.

SDPB’s C.J. Keene reports.

Gov. Rhoden says he left the private meeting feeling optimistic about the future of state-tribal relations.

“There were things that we were palms up with them as far as some of the concerns, some of the areas we disagreed on. We agreed to disagree, and we had more conversation. As we walked out of the room, we had built a relationship, and I think that we’ll continue to build on that. It was a product of open, honest conversation.”

State-tribal relations effectively collapsed during the administration of former Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), who was at one point banned from every single reservation in the state.

That came following tribal sovereignty disputes during the pandemic and Gov. Noem commenting that Native children “had no hope”.

@nativevoiceoneRosebud Sioux Tribe President Kathleen Wooden Knife delivered South Dakota’s annual State of the Tribes address to lawmakers. The tribal leader discussed working with the state government on health care and law enforcement during her speech Wednesday, as South Dakota Searchlight’s Meghan O’Brien reports in the latest edition of National Native News with Antonia Gonzales. https://www.nativenews.net/thursday-january-15-2026 Video courtesy SDPB Network♬ original sound – Native Voice One

 

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Monday, January 19, 2026 – Maintaining Martin Luther King, Jr’s vision for civil rights