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…
Category: Opioid Crisis
Emerald City
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…
Dopesick
“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…
Xylazine-Mind F
Xylazine, a horse tranquilizer, has been increasingly found as an adulterant in the East Coast street supply of fentanyl. In 2019 in Connecticut, xylazine and fentanyl were found together in 71 overdose deaths. There were 141 deaths of this combination in 2020, and in 2021, through August with still many cases outstanding, the number…
Pediatric Poisoning
You’re called to an urgent care center on a priority one. The nurse is holding the front door of the center open for you and directs you back to a treatment room, where a PA and another nurse are providing ventilations to a two year-year-old. The story they tell you is the the child fell…
Safe Supply
Instead of following the same failed policies, if we are serious about lessening the deaths and ending the slaughter of far too many Americans, we need a new approach.
Overdose Awareness Day 2021
800,000 Americans dead since 2000. No end in sight. People are dying because they use alone and their drug supply is contaminated. In the age of fentanyl, every bag or counterfeit pill bought on the street could contain a lethal dose. Stopping fentanyl at the border isn’t going to work. The War on Drugs (Interdiction…
Falsehood Flies
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels *** This week, the San Diego County Sherriff’s Department posted a video purporting to be a deputy overdosing after minimal contact with fentanyl…
Two Reasons
By all accounts, the opioid overdose epidemic is getting worse. A recent study published in JAMA which analyzed emergency department visits (ED) found overdoses were up 29% from March to October of 2020 versus the same period for the previous year. Opioid overdoses 29% higher in 2020 than before the pandemic: Study Fatal Unintentional Drug…
Dead
As I approach the house with my medic pack over my shoulder and my monitor and isolation bag in my hands, two boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen, stand on the sidewalk out front of the building, and look at me expectantly. “He’s not alive? Is he? Is he still alive?” the shorter one asks. I…
A Simple Dream
Twenty-seven years ago, in a retaliatory shooting, a man in Hartford’s north end opened fire with an automatic weapon, killing his target. He was sentenced to fifty years in prison. He left at home a baby daughter, *** I get called for the unconscious. I arrive first and climb windy wooden stairs to the third…
Mate
Welfare check. The superintendent lets us in. The apartment is a poor man’s hoarderville, open boxes and dirty clothes stacked as high as the unwashed dishes in the sink. The man is sitting at a table with his head in his hands; a chess board in front of him. For a moment, I fear he…
Sunday Morning Coming Down
On the Sunday morning sidewalkWishing, Lord, that I was stoned‘Cause there’s something in a SundayMakes a body feel alone.“Sunday Morning Coming Down” – Kris Kristofferson Twenty-six people in Connecticut died of overdoses on the four Sundays of this past April. Twenty-one males. Five females. One was aged 15-24, eight were 25-34, six 35-44, four 45-54,…
Narcania
There is a cartoon hero named Narcania created by the same guy who wrote Lil’Dope Fiend Overdose Prevention Guide. In the mini comix, Narcania rescues people who have overdosed and gives them new life. As one character who has been resuscitated remarks, “I don’t know if there is anything worth living for, but at least now,…
Connecticut EMS Overdose Data
In Connecticut, when EMS responds to an opioid overdose, after they have taken the patient to the hospital, accepted a refusal, or presumed a patient dead, they are required to contact the state poison control center and answer a series of questions about the overdose. The program, known as SWORD (Statewide Opioid Reporting Directive), that…
Nalmefene
I heard today that Opiant, the company behind the 4 mg Narcan Intranasal spray, is at work on a new product to combat opioid overdose — Intranasal Nalmefene. Nalmefene Nasal Spray Nalmefene is an FDA approved medication to reverse opioid overdoses when used intravenously. It has yet to be approved in a nasal form suitable for…
A Boy
In 1999, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant about a police shooting in the city. The newspaper reported that an unarmed 14-year old black boy had been shot in the back by a white police officer. They put the story on the front page under the headline Family, Police Want Answers: No Weapon…
Harm Reduction
Connecticut’s harm reduction workers are out on the street everyday trying to make the world safer for those caught in substance use. This is particularly important in this time of COVID-19. I am often questioned whether or not harm reduction – syringe services, community naloxone, overdose prevention sites, drop-in centers– are not just enabling users….
A Ravine in Winter
There is a picture in the Hartford Courant of Mark Jenkins talking with police officers looking as forlorn as I have ever seen him. They stand next to yellow tape sectioning off an area of woods just off Park Terrace where down a small ravine a man has been found dead. The paper describes the crime scene…
Judge Rules for Safe Injection Site
A federal judge ruled yesterday that a nonprofit group in Philadelphia’s effort to open a safe injection site where people can use drugs under medical supervision does not violate the federal crackhouse statutes prohibiting the operation of a space “for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing or using controlled substances.” U.S. District Judge Gerald McHugh wrote: “The ultimate…