The naloxone kits handed out at New York jobsites in late August got the coverage. The credentialing change underneath them is the part that touches every general contractor’s compliance file.
Local Law 10 of 2026 took effect on 3 May and requires Site Safety Training cards to cover mental health and wellness, suicide risk and prevention, and alcohol and substance misuse. From 1 August, SST Worker and Supervisor renewal options were updated to include a 2-Hour Mental Health Awareness course, usable for renewal when paired with either the 2-Hour Tool Box Talks course or the 2-Hour Pre-Task Meeting course.
What changed and what didn’t
The baseline is untouched: at least 40 hours of training for workers and 62 for supervisors. What moved is the content mix inside the renewal cycle, which means the change arrives gradually, worker by worker, as cards come up for renewal rather than on a single compliance date.
Scale is the reason this is worth tracking. DOB reports more than 450,000 SST cards issued to date, representing over 18 million hours of training. A content requirement attached to that card reaches further than almost any voluntary contractor program could.
The outreach ran alongside it. DOB and NYC Health + Hospitals visited construction sites the week before 31 August distributing free naloxone kits with administration training. H+H runs addiction consult services in 11 emergency departments and reported roughly 42,000 addiction consult encounters in 2025, over 7,600 referrals to outpatient services and about 4,800 naloxone kits distributed. Referral routes cited are 1-844-NYC-4NYC and 988.
One claim to handle carefully
DOB’s release asserts that construction workers have had among the highest rates of fatal drug overdose of any profession in the city. It publishes no rate, no year and no denominator for that, and links to an older DOB page rather than a health department dataset. Attribute it to DOB and say the release does not publish the underlying number.
Nothing in the announcement links the training requirement to any measured reduction in overdoses, and it would be too early for it to. The 450,000 cards and the 42,000 consult encounters are administrative counts. They measure activity, not outcome.
Why other jurisdictions will copy it
Because it solves a delivery problem rather than a content problem. Every large contractor already knows behavioral health is a jobsite issue; almost none has a mechanism to reach a transient trade workforce with it. New York had a mandatory card, so it put the content in the card.
Contractors staffing sites above the SST threshold, from tower repositionings like PENN 2 in Manhattan down to mid-rise residential, should be checking that their training providers have the 2-Hour Mental Health Awareness course on the schedule before the renewal wave arrives, not after.