The Drug Enforcement Administration held a news conference Tuesday to announce Pittsburgh as the first pilot city for a new strategy aimed at addressing prescription opioid abuse, heroin use and violent crime.

According to a news release, the goals of the new strategy are “stopping the deadly cycle of prescription opioid and heroin abuse by eliminating the drug-trafficking organizations and gangs fueling violence on the streets and addiction in communities.”

DEA officials said they also plan to partner with health care professionals and work with community and social-service organizations that are most equipped to help with the strategy in the long term.

“We’ve gone after the biggest, baddest drug organizations. We haven’t been good about community engagement,” said Gary Tuggle, special agent in charge at the DEA Philadelphia Field Division. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto also spoke at the news conference and admitted where he thought the city might have gone wrong in the past.

“We’ve looked at this as a law enforcement issue in the past, and we’ve failed,” Peduto said.

National partners participating in the strategy include the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Pennsylvania, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the DEA Educational Foundation, the U.S. Department of Health & Humans Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The strategy also plans to crack down on pharmacists who are writing bad prescriptions and build community outreach and education. 

U.S. Attorney David Hickton thanked the DEA for choosing Western Pennsylvania as the first pilot of the new strategy.

“Thank you for putting your trust in Western Pennsylvania. We won’t let you down,” he said to Tuggle.

Numbers gathered from death certificates by Overdose Free PA showed that 50 people overdosed on heroin in 2010. Last year, that number skyrocketed to 157, and current data indicates that the number is on pace to be even higher this year.

Channel 11’s Aaron Martin dug deeper into data from Drug Free PA to see which Pittsburgh neighborhoods have been struck the most by overdoses. 

Beltzhoover, Knoxville and Mount Oliver, along with parts of Brookline and the South Side Slopes, had more than 70 reported fatal overdoes. 

Similar results were found on the North Side, Fineview, Marshal-Shadeland, East Allegheny and Reserve Township.