Before he started taking methadone, Vinny Parisi had overdosed 16 times from using street drugs, including fentanyl. Now, Mr. Parisi goes every weekday morning to an R.V.-size white van parked at a Days Inn in the South Bronx. “This definitely works, I’m living proof,” Mr. Parisi said on a recent Tuesday outside the van, where he was waiting with about a dozen other men from his residential drug treatment program. Mr. Parisi is one of an estimated 450,000 Americans who take methadone, a powerful weapon in the fight against the fentanyl overdose crisis hiding in plain sight. But it can also be hard to come by, because of government rules that have kept its distribution tightly controlled.

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Persons: Vinny Parisi, Parisi, Mr, “, ” Locations: Harlem, South Bronx, Staten Island