I am proud to announce our article Community-Originated Research to Identify Access Gaps in Over-the-Counter Naloxone Availability in Connecticut Pharmacies has been published in the Harm Reduction Journal. The article, which began as a school project my daughter Zoey started by surveying pharmacies in Hartford about naloxone availability, was expanded statewide and the results were…
My daughter is reading The Remains of the Day for her summer school assignment. I read the book many years ago and also saw the movie that starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and earned 8 academy award nominations. The story is about an aging English butler, who reflects on his life and the notions…
My new book The Friends and Family Guide to the Opioid Overdose Epidemic: Including How to Recognize and Treat an Overdose is going to be released on August 26, 2025 . In 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press published my last book, Killing Season: A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic. It…
You’re a new firefighter-paramedic and you are not fitting in. You are quiet, reserved. You lack the natural swagger of many of your co-workers. And you like the medic part of your job more than the fire. Your district mates give you a hard time about riding in calls they say you should have downgraded…
I am going to turn 67 this month. I am the oldest active paramedic in our division. Today I read an article in the Washington Post about a 76 year old EMT who started his career at 65 and only retired from active duty this year because the physical demands of the job became too…
My two favorite Connecticut politicians are in a dispute with each other. Governor Ned Lamont and Senator Saud Anwar are both outstanding public servants. I like both men very much. Governor Lamont is a moderate, Senator Anwar is to his left. Senator Anwar has been the leader in the effort to create overdose prevention sites (OPCs)…
I was at a basketball tournament with my daughter last week in Louiseville, Kentucky at the Kentucky Exposition Center. The event called Run 4 the Roses draws 1,600 teams (9,000 players) and college coaches from across the United States, and 9 countries, including teams from as far away as Australia. They had 84 courts inside…
A man overdosed with his two young children in the car. The unidentified woman in the front seat next to him also overdosed. According to the children, he started falling asleep while driving and managed to pull into a parking lot, where he was found unconscious with his foot still on the brake. The woman…
According to news reports 27 people overdosed in Baltimore on Thursday on a drug packaged as “New Jack City” and possibly contaminated with Freon or antifreeze. I am guessing that the primary drug is fentanyl, but I don’t know that. The samples of “New Jack City” were given out as free samples by an as…
We respond for the “overdose.” In a lot that is littered with wax bags and other drug paraphernalia, a Spanish man is sitting alone in a row of three portable chairs in the sun. His eyes are closed, his mouth is open. He is as still as a dead man. While my partner pulls the…
A Connecticut woman was found in her house six months after police came for an initial welfare check when a neighbor reported she hadn’t seen her for a few weeks. The police came back several more times in the ensuing months, but each time were stymied by the mountain of junk that made it nearly…
The heat wave supposedly ended two days ago, but here I am sweltering in an ambulance sitting in the parking lot behind CVS. My phone says its 79 degrees, but there is no shade, no wind, the humidity is heavy and the AC isn’t worth shit. I had to go to bed early last night…
“Addicts take opiates and other sedatives specifically to induce a pleasant stupor. If they’re lethargic and hard to arouse, but still breathing effectively, it’s not an overdose. It’s a dose.” –Boston paramedic This is a quote I included in a presentation I put together for the state of Connecticut back in 2014 when we designed…
Once a month, the CDC releases their provisional fatal overdose data based on a 12-month rolling average. The CDC’s data is 4 months behind. Lately, each month the release of the data has led to glowing articles about overdoses going down, which they had been for some time — quite substantially. That was until this…
This is my first Father’s Day without my own father who passed away last August at 90. I think of him everyday. While I can’t call him, it is not hard for me to remember him. I see him hitting a home run in a company picnic softball game when I was a little boy….
The Washington Post published an article on May 31, 2025 called: The mysterious drop in fentanyl seizures on the U.S.-Mexico border: The reasons behind the decrease of fentanyl seizures in the U.S. and along the Mexico-U.S. border are complex. The article has brought the Post some scathing criticism from President Trump supporters, who claim the obvious…
Every June Rich Kamin, my EMS Medical Director and I give a talk on EMS Stroke Care at our hospital’s annual Emergency Stroke Symposium. This has been going on for a decade now. We are a good team. I am the play by play man and he is the color commentator. I put the presentation…
I am part of a statewide harm reduction advocacy group, called SHArP (Statewide Harm Reduction Partnership), who have been working to pass legislation in Connecticut to create overdose prevention centers (OPCs) similar to those already established in New York and Rhode Island, where people can use drugs in clean, safe conditions where trained staff are…
An old friend of mine who still works the road full time confided in me that he was again having a crisis of faith. We have often talked about burnout, each of us having periods when we found it a struggle to uphold the highest standards of patient care. Not the medicine part, which is…
There has been much speculation about why fatal overdose deaths have been declining nationwide. Here are some of the reasons mentioned in a plethora of articles: 1. Increased Availability of Naloxone 2. Expanded Addiction Treatment 3. Shift from Injecting to Smoking and Other Safer Practices such a as Not Using Alone 4. Impact of Opioid…