Quote:“It was almost exclusively central Brooklyn, South Bronx, east Harlem and overlapped with New York City’s highest-need neighborhoods,” said Dr. Kolodny, now the chief medical officer at the Phoenix House Foundation, a drug-treatment center. “The rest of the city — Staten Island, Queens, most of Manhattan — close to nothing.”

Even before the latest data became available, the scope of the heroin problem was apparent on the streets, in treatment centers and at police precincts.

Seizures of heroin spiked as the city became a hub for trafficking along the East Coast. Overdose victims turned up in neighborhoods from East Tremont in the Bronx to Tottenville in southern Staten Island, prompting the New York Police Department to begin outfitting officers this year with naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of an overdose from both heroin and opioid pill