“We need a lot more naloxone than ever before. The drugs are so powerful today some people need 20 milligrams”. I hear this or versions of it in many of the opioid task force meetings I attend around the state. No, I say. The research I have based on over 20,000 EMS run forms shows…
A mayor in California has proposed giving free fentanyl to his city’s homeless to kill them off. California mayor wants to give homeless people ‘all the fentanyl they want’: ‘Need to purge these people’ “Quite frankly, I wish that the president would give us a purge. Because we do need to purge these people,” Lancaster…
The latest CDC provisional overdose fatality data is out and continues to show nationwide decline in fatal overdoses through October of 2024, down 26.5% over the last 12 months and 27.6% from its June 2023 12-month high, declining to a level equivalent to May 2020 (shortly after COVID hit). It should be noted that more…
The call is for a seizure. A 9-year-old boy with epilepsy falls off the couch and is observed seizing, with full tonic-clonic activity. His mom shouts for the boy’s older sister to call 911, and then she goes to her purse and takes out the medicine his doctor prescribed for him. She sticks the nozzle…
This week I attended a meeting in the Governor’s office in the state capitol to advocate for a bill creating the state’s first overdose prevention center. I was one of a group of eight meeting with the Governor’s chief of staff. Our group included two mothers who had lost their sons to overdose and were…
You are dispatched for an overdose. You find a 48-year-old homeless man sitting on a park bench, eyes closed, nodding forward. You give him a little shake and he opens his eyes and looks up at you. You ask him if he is okay and he says he is all right. He says he took…
Back in 2016 when the opioid epidemic was starting to heat up, I started paying attention to the heroin bags laying on the ground. The bags were Small glassine envelopes that hold 0.1 grams of powder (mix of opioids like heroin or fentanyl and cut with adulterants like sugars, baby formula, etc) when full, often…
I am a huge fan of the show The Pitt, which I have twice posted about. I love its authenticity, both in medical treatment and emotion. That said, the last two episodes which involve a mass shooting with 80 plus critical patients strained my credibility with all the miraculous and creative saves done by the…
The Investigation team of a local news station ran a story about ambulance response times in Hartford. I-Team: Response times steadily increasing in Hartford, dispatch data shows The hook call: A baby wasn’t breathing. 911 was called. The ambulance response was delayed. The baby, who was eventually transported in a police car (22 minutes…
I started this blog over 20 years ago. At the time I wrote mainly about the interesting calls I was doing. Nowadays, besides writing about the opioid epidemic, it seems I write mostly about being an old medic trying to keep up, beating back father time. This is another one of those posts. I worked…
Final 2024 numbers are out from the Connecticut Office of the Medical Examiner and they show an even greater decline in fatal overdoses in 2024 than anticipated. For the first time since 2016, the state saw fewer than 1000 deaths. Congratulations all who have been working so hard to bring these deaths down. And please…
I testified before the Connecticut Legislature’s Public Health Committee on February 21, 2025 in support of a bill to create an overdose prevention center pilot program in our state. The bill is sponsored by Senator Saud Anwar, a physician and great friend of harm reduction. Here is a link to the text of the bill:…
Medical drama TV doesn’t get any better than The Pitt. This show (on Max) impresses me so much I am compelled to post again about it. Not only is it getting the medicine right, it gets the human drama right, and it honors health care workers with sentiment, not sentimentality. In other words, the emotions…
A pharmaceutical company is apparently targeting police departments to get them to carry OPVEE (nalfemene), a long-acting opioid antagonist that the two top toxicology organizations in the country say has significant risks and has not been studied in actual settings. In an article by New England Public Media, Health experts alarmed at new overdose drug…
My daughter Zoey had to do 25 hours of volunteer time for her school so I hooked her up with the local harm reduction drop in center, where she helped put together safe drug use kits as well as naloxone rescue kits. Some days she sat outside the bathroom door and monitored the three-minute clock…
When I started as a paramedic in Hartford in January of 1995, I was given a 100-page protocol book to memorize. There were fewer than 50 protocols in the book, along with pages for 24 medications and 8 procedures. The book was approved by the two largest hospitals in Hartford. Looking through the book today,…
There is a new “ER” style show on Max called The Pitt that stars Noah Wylie, the guy who played Carter, the young doctor on ER. Wylie now portrays Dr. Rabinavitch (“Dr. Robby”), the senior attending in a busy Pittsburgh emergency department, who goes from patient to patient, emergency to emergency, overseeing a cast of…
I was talking to a doctor friend about the movie Asphalt City. He mentioned the scene where the old crackhead lady was relentlessly berating the young paramedic who just sat there saying nothing, looking all burnt to hell already, not two months into the job. We talked about burnout. Burnout comes in waves, I said. …
President Joe Biden today commuted the sentences of almost 2500 people doing hard time for nonviolent drug offenses. The action was aimed at righting injustice. Old sentencing guidelines provided disproportionately harsh sentences for those found with crack cocaine (largely blacks) while those found with powdered cocaine (largely whites) received much more lenient sentences. Biden, who…
The latest CDC provisional 12-month rolling numbers (through August 2024) are out for fatal overdoses and the news continues to be promising. The US reported overdose fatal numbers are down 23.2 % from the August 2023 high. * In Connecticut reported overdoses are down 29.9% from our November 2021 high, a level equivalent to July…