Updated - July 11, 2025: At least 27 people have been hospitalized as part of this mass overdose. Read more.

A suspected “bad batch” of street drugs swept through West Baltimore on Thursday morning, leaving men and women slumped and unconscious in the streets and sending rescue crews scrambling to search the back alleys and vacant homes for more victims.

First responders flooded the Penn North neighborhood shortly after 9 a.m. to find more than a dozen people in need of aid.

As of Thursday night, there were no fatalities but 25 people had been hospitalized for suspected overdoses, according to Lindsey Eldridge, Baltimore City Police Department spokesperson.

Baltimore City Health Department closed half a block to treat people outside the Pennsylvania Avenue Branch of the Enoch Pratt Library.

Bill Brooks, CEO of Penn North Recovery Center, was in his office when someone ran in yelling about the reported overdoses. He and his employees grabbed boxes of Narcan and began checking nearby vacant buildings, where people often go to use drugs.

“Our worst fear was that we were going to come across someone dead,” Brooks said. “I’ve never heard of anything of this scale.”

They encountered no overdose victims but passed out more than 140 boxes of Narcan within the first hour.

Search-and-rescue crews canvassed the area for hours looking for more potential overdose victims.

Several streets in the area were closed to facilitate the search, and CityLink and LocalLink Routes 85, Gold and Lime are detouring until 6 a.m. The Penn-North Metro station will also remain closed until 5 a.m. Friday, according to the Maryland Transit Administration, and all trains will bypass the stop.

The mass overdose came just one day after City Council held its first long-awaited public hearing on the city’s drug crisis. Councilwoman Phylicia Porter, who called the hearings, said Thursday’s overdoses were devastating.

“It underscores the urgency that we have and continue to have to promote harm reduction approaches in Baltimore,” Porter said in an interview.

Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said he does not know what drugs were involved and an investigation is ongoing.

Candy Kerr, spokesperson for the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition, a community-based group that serves drug users, said its workers were conducting routine street outreach Thursday morning when they started hearing reports of overdoses caused by a “bad batch.”

She urged anyone who uses drugs to avoid substances that may have originated from the Penn North area. Kerr also said, “If you’re going to use, do so around people who have Narcan and know how to use it.”

‘It’s like a mass shooting’

City and community workers walked around the neighborhood teeming with bystanders and emergency vehicles with boxes of the overdose-reversal drug naloxone and fentanyl test strips. While standing across from the library on Pennsylvania Avenue, a woman asked for several boxes of Narcan. She had just seen someone fall unconscious down the block and wanted to make sure she was prepared for the next one.

Vincent Timmons, an outreach worker for the drug treatment program Tuerk House, sprayed a dose of naloxone up the nose of a woman he found lying on the sidewalk when he pulled up to Penn North.

Timmons, 60, is no stranger to overdoses, but the scene at Penn North was unlike any other he’d seen.

“It’s like a mass shooting,” he said, but “they didn’t use no gun. They used narcotics.”

Eric Johnson was surveying the area where Druid Heights Community Development Corp. does real estate and community outreach, including health check-ins. He stressed that a mass overdose doesn’t just happen overnight — it’s the result of decades of disinvestment in the city.

“It takes a lot of effort, when something like this happens, to respond,” Johnson, the corporation’s real estate manager, said. “And an even greater effort to ensure nothing like this happens again.”

Just outside the barbershop where Christopher Fowlkes has been working for nearly 20 years, yellow tape wrapped around the area near Penn North Metro station. Outside of a couple people canceling their appointments Thursday, Fowlkes was going about his day, cutting hair, normally.

“You see the stuff so much, you become immune to it,” Fowlkes said. “You see somebody lying on the street, you just walk over them. … It’s a shame, but that’s the way it is.”

William Stewart, a violence prevention coordinator for Safe Streets Sandtown, was in his office when he got the call about the overdoses. He and other team members jumped into action.

Though Safe Streets team members typically help with violence prevention, their knowledge and training on overdoses and CPR equipped them to respond to this “health alert,” Stewart said. One of the victims, he learned, was a friend.

“It’s devastating because you know a person before they get in active addiction,” he said. “It’s scary seeing a person you actually know overdose.”

Baltimore unveils plan to cut overdose deaths

Last week, Baltimore leaders unveiled a draft plan for how the city wants to reduce overdose deaths 40% by 2040. The plan envisions around-the-clock outreach teams that will connect people to drug addiction services, which should include safe spaces where people can rest and receive resources.

The city will also hold public hearings for three more consecutive Wednesdays, at which city leaders can ask questions and community members can testify about the toll of addiction.

Several made impassioned pleas Wednesday to bring supervised drug consumption sites to the city. Those have been effective in preventing fatal overdoses in New York and other countries but have murky legal status in the U.S.

Harm reduction advocates have attempted for years to get state lawmakers to allow the opening of such sites in Maryland.

Kerr of the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition said even one overdose takes a toll, let alone 10 to 20.

“It’s devastated a community that was already ravaged by the racist war on drugs and blight in general.”