This week I was asked by the Connecticut Alcohol Drug Policy Treatment SubCommittee to comment on the new FDA approved high dose 8 mg naloxone product, Kloxxado, from the EMS perspective, Here’s what I told them: Three Points High dose naloxone has no place in EMS/First Responder arsenal. 2. It has not been proven…
Thirty three years I’ve been in EMS now and if there is one line of advice I have for people starting out in the field, or just for life in general for that matter it is: Don’t Be an Asshole EMS is stressful and we are constantly in situations that may put us in conflict…
(An excerpt from a fictional work in progress.) Prologue Hernando already had a 200-gram bag of heroin on the table, as well as a smaller baggie of fentanyl, a canister of baby formula, four packages of Benadryl, and several small open cardboard boxes, each holding 600 of the blank glassine envelopes they would be putting…
A firefighter has already bandaged the patient’s head by the time I arrive in the fly car. The man sits on the front stoop looking like the fifer in the revolutionary war painting of the three marching wounded soldiers the way his head is wrapped. The firefighter points out the puddle of blood in the…
When I started as a paramedic in Hartford in 1995, I thought drug users had character flaws and belonged in jail. Last week at a panel discussion in Hartford I stood up before National Drug Control Policy Acting Director Regina LaBelle, United States Senator Richard Blumenthal, United States Representative John Larsen, and the Mayor of…
She took the Dilaudid pill a friend offered her twelve years ago when she was sixteen. Her sister had recently died and her young life, filled with depression and anxiety, had lost its only source of light. The pill made her feel well in a way she had never felt before. She liked who she…
I am sixty-three years old, six foot eight. I used to be six nine and a half, but life has beaten me down. Over thirty years in EMS has flattened my spine to the point that some days I can barely feel my legs. I have no business being back on a basketball court, but…
“Dopesick” is a new eight-episode series dramatizing the start of the opioid overdose epidemic that originated with Purdue Pharma’s marketing campaign for oxycodone .The series is populated with a fictional cast of characters, including a country doctor (Michael Keaton), a young woman injured in a coal mining accident and her parents who struggle to understand…