♪ ♪ ♪ >> and now on c-span2's book tv, more television for serious >>reader. >> i'm delighted to discuss steven cannon, front lines of the opioid epidemic. peter cannon has been in the hartford area since 1995. first book paramedic, front lines, caregiver on the city

streets, rescue 471 is a sequel. since 2006 peter has been influential of blog known as paramedic and he has attended phillips academy in virginia, he was a taxi driver, meatpacker, book and movie review e and an author before he found his place as a paramedic. in addition to paramedic, he's the ems coordinator in farmington, connecticut. without further due, i would like to welcome peter cannon, hi, peter. hang on. i think -- let me see. there you go. >> thanks for attending. >> would you tell us about killing season for those who might not be familiar with the book in. >> okay, soo killing season is a

book here that just came out and it's about my experiences as a paramedic over the last 25 years and following the opioid epidemic. as i'll go through in my presentation, i started to learn things in the course of my work and i wanted to bring my experiences in the voices of my patients to other readers so they could be changed in the way i was changed in my view about the opioid epidemic. >> awesome, thank you so much. i'm looking forward seeing your presentation and i know your audience is as well. we will share the screen and go ahead through the presentation and i will be with all of you in the chat and then we will come back to audience questions during the second half of the event. >> okay. can you see that okay? >> yes, we can see your screen.

>> all right. okay. this is a picture of albany acin hartford where i work. i've been there as a paramedic in hartford for over 25 years and i've become attached to the city and this is a picture that i particularly love. okay, so i began as a paramedic. there's a picture of me in 1995 when i started working as a paramedic inha hartford and thas me a couple of ago. and the line there is the national drug overdose deaths. you can see in 1995 while there was over 10,000 people dying a year in the united states, it just -- it has skyrocketed since

then. this graph only goes to 2016. i just read today the latest data for the 12-month period, there's 88,000 people in the iunited states die of drug overdoses. so when i began ass a paramedic and i handle people with drug overdoses. i thought that people overdosed and used drug because they had a flaw.ter i would say to them just say no or you will end up dead or in jail. i didn't understand how people could willfully inject themselves with a drug that could so easily kill them. i didn't understand how people could inject themselves with drug in front of their own children. now, in addition to being a a paramedic i'm also the ems

coordinator at john hospital and a few years back i encountered this one. so when a paramedic does a call they fill in a whole bunch of details and they write describing what happen. upon arrival, found a 24-year-old male unresponsive lying on the floor with his bedroom with mother performing cpr on him. he states that he last saw him alive an hour ago and then found him on the floor unconscious before calling 911. she states there's history of heroin abuse and huge needle next to him. he's unresponsive with no palpable pulse which he's not breathing. what struck me about this, not that the mother is doing cpr which is a horrible thing but this wasn't unusual.

this wasn't the first time i had ran across the narrative like this and i was on several cars that were similar and i just began to look around and say what is happening, what has come about, the tragedies are common oiplace. in looking to find out what was going on, there's two stories, there's the national story. i describe it in my book but the national story, it's fairly well known. opioid epidemic started with the rise of prescription pain pills. the pharmaceutical companies advertise that these pills weren't addictive, a lot of doctors, well-meaning but probably hadn't looked into as well as they should tended to prescribe these quite liberally. as the numbers of pills and more and more pills were made available each year, more and more people began to die of

overdose. about 2010 what happened was, there's a pill oxycodone and what users would do, they would scrape it down to powder and they would snort it and they came out with a reformulation of oxycontin. for well-meaning things, sometimes they lead to unintended consequences. what happened almost immediately with the arrival of the reformulated oxycontin, the people who use today use oxycontin switched to heroin. they are very much the same. heroin was surprisingly much more widely available and much cheaper than the bill. so as we saw another big

uprising in deaths and then i will talk about this more later on. we had arrival of fentanyl, synthetic drug, opioid that is devastating the country now with deaths. so there's the national story but what interested me more was the individual story. so as paramedic when i respond to a call, a person might not be breathing, there's evidence that they've used opioids, some of the syndromes, not breathing or very slow and the pup pills can be pinpoint, they can be in many cases completely unresponsive. we give them the drug which most people have known well. i take the patient and put them

to the ambulance and go to the hospital and i had the opportunity to talk to patients and i began to ask them, how did you get involve with this, how did you end up where you are. the stories that they told me stormed the genesis of the book. as i said before, their storiese completely change the way i view the opioid epidemic and people who use drugs and i wanted to take their stories and share them with people so that they would learn what i learned. i want to tell you about 3 of the patients who i wrote about in the book. i want to take you back in time. it's a friday night at a football game, a local high school. half time, the home team is ahead by a touchdown, the cheerleaders are out on the field and the crowds all excited, it's beautiful, beautiful night. two cheerleaders are tossed up

into the air. theyin are spinning way above te crowd. one cheerleader comes down and they catch her and the crowd cheers. the second leader comes down, they drop her. there's silence. the father comes down from the crowd, an ambulance is called. when i get there she's lying on the ground, daddy, daddy, my back is killing me. we were careful with her and put a collar on the neck and the father drives in the front and keeps saying how she's doing. two years later, i get called for a car accident. i see a young woman. it's a minor accident. there's in the like a huge

amount of damage to the car. as i open the door to look at it, i see next to her a syringe and a heroin bag that says sweetheart and has rose tattoos and looks familiar to me. she goes, i screwed up. i just got out of rehab. i was doing so well. what happens to a lot of people is when they get o out of rehab and haven't used for a while, they use and they use the same amount that they used to use and it's too much and they overdose. i used to say, it's the first time i slipped up. i used to think that they were fooling me. in most cases in overdose it's quite common, somebody who just got out of jail or rehab or hended period where they hadn't used drugs for a while. so by looking at her i start

talking to her and i ask as we do, requestu history, what other medical do you have. she said i broke my back cheerleading and she said the name of the town and she said that was me. i asked what had happened to her. a she had surgery on her back, she had a difficult year, she couldn't go to school. she lost a lot of her friends. they gave fair high amount of pain pills, her doctor did and then after aer year, her doctor said you don't need them anymore and she said to me, i still did need them. people develop tolerance and addiction to pills. it's very, very hard to just stop taking. so the sickness that she felt to battle that, she would buy pills from friends in high school but they became very expensive. the pills are 30-milligram

oxycodone. the same person selling pills to them has heroin and would sell ithat. the thing about heroin. i will get to that later on. it's powder. it's very easy to just sniff. you don't have to tie a belt around the arm and dive a needle in your elbow. she started heroin before she was injecting and her life fell apart and she looked at me and she said, i used to be a normal person. i said, i remember that. the phrase i used to be a normal person i heard over and over from my patients. but for her -- i often wondered

with her what would have happened that night if when they had thrown her high into the hair she hadn't fall, how would her trajectory would have been different, she would n have gone to the dance that night, nicegr graduation, onto college, perhaps an engagement, a marriage, a house with a white-picket fence and a family. instead all of her dreams now were going to a hole in her arm. we get called for a person nonresponsive andre not breathig in a p parking lot of what usedo be a hospital but now it's a rehab center. the fire department arrived before us and we get them into the balance and get them on the stretcher and he says to me what a scum bag i am.

i was supposed to take my son trick or treating tonight. look at what i've done. his plan was he had just gotten out of jail. he did 30 days for an outstanding warrant and the warrant was he got caught with a broken taillight at one point in time. so he got out of jail. some friends picked him up and as a celebration they gave him one bag of heroin. he thought what would one bag of heroin do to me. keep in mind, he has not used for a while. in addition for not using for those 30 days when he was in jail, he had actually quit two months before that. so he goes after all i've been through to almost die like this sso i was taking care of him ad i'm putting ectros on his chest

to monitor heart rate. it's a bullet hole. so the day after 911, he joined the army, he went over to iraq, he was ambushed, suffered a brain injury. he got shot and so he ended up leaving the -- he left the army with a horrible addiction to pain pills that they had given him and with a purple heart. and here he is saying to me, what a scum bag i am. this is the guy that the day after 9/11 went to the service to fight for the rest of us and yet he feels today like the world has used him as somebody not worthy. so when we took him to the hospital, what i've always do, the paramedic take patients into

the emergency department and then we turn them over to the emergency staff which is paramedic, nurses, we put them in a hospital bed. whenever i bring in a patient from an opioid overdose, i always tell the nurse their story and hope to get empathy from them. i told her, the nurse that night about what had happened to him in the army and her husband was in the reserves, fought in iraq. so she -- she went into the room with most of the er staff that night and said to him, thank you for your service. that was a nice way to treat them. it's a way i would like to see all people treated. there's a saying, we leave no one behind and that should apply not just to those in thell military but all of the people

in our society. i write quite a bit about her. when i first met i noticed her holding a homeless and hungry sign standing in the rain and my partner andtn i we carry with u, we carry water on hot days, we carry out oranges and fruit and sometimes spare change to help people out and we drove by and i started talking to her. i said, how are you doing, she said i'm not doing well. i gave her some change, gave her an orange. i saw her later in the day and she said she was feeling a little bit later and i saw her next week and had a chance to talk to her more and i said, so how did you get started doing this. she said that her mom was 14 when she was born, her mom was a drug user who gave her up for heroin. she was raised by her grandmother. she said that she always wanted

to try heroin because she wanted to know what it was about heroin that made her mom love heroin more than her. and so at 17 she tried heroin for the first time and she said as soon as i tried it, i ununderstood my mother. so all these people, you wonder what their lives would have been like if the cheerleader hadn't been dropped or the guy wouldn't list in the army or the normal had a normal upbringing. despite that, there were questions that i had to understand, whyy knowing how horrible the drugs are to their lives, why do people keep using. so i started asking that question of some scientists and a number of them used the same analogy to describe it to me which i thought was pretty

interesting. so humans are programmed to eat, have sex and to take care of their children. when we do these things, our brain releases endorphins that make us feel good. it's like a firework goes in our brain. even when we think about having a pizza. the reason that we are programmed to do these things, to have sex and to eat and to take care of children because it ensures the survival of the human race iff we do these things. what they say is that heroin, opioids, when you take those, for some people rather than firework going off on their brain, it's like the fourth of july with the fireworks. the fireworks are so potent and so powerful that in time they

are no longer able to produce endorphins for the things that matter and it becomes all about getting opioid. what i learned is that it is not a character flaw but a brain disease, a chronic brain disease. what happens in the brain is when you first use, go, oh, this isn fantastic and in time anothr part of the brain goes off and starting to lose the feeling. you know, maybe i should think about how i will get the feeling again. when the third part of the brain becomes completely preoccupied and i have to get it again, how can i do that, and so what happens with people who become addicted to opioids is the cycle goes on in their brain and

eventually rewires, the reward pathways sowa that it's not addg food, it's not having sex, it's not taking care of their kids. it's getting heroin, is the key to their survival. it's very difficult for them to change that. there's a movie that i saw many years ago with my daughter and it is called inside out and in the movie there's the wonderful hecharacters who live in the person's brain and wonderful personalities and they all battle back and forth at the control panels. what happens sometimes when people become addicted to heroin is another character comes into that bane and takes over the control board we have to wonder that those other personalities are there and we can't forget

about them. a damaged brain whose pathways have been rewired is a medical problem. drug use, somebody who is using drugs should not be criminal problem but medical problem. you can put these people in cat scan machines and you can see the damage to their brain. it's not an invisible thing. you can actually see it in the same way that you look at somebody's heart and lungs in a machine to see that they're damaged. so to expect that somebody whose reward pathways have been rewired by heroin to constantly make good decisions is askin to expect somebody with copd in mount everest or someone to run 100-mile dash, it's very difficult, hard to do. what i started to do, i started

to learn about is you couldn't say to somebody no because it's not an easy thing to do. so there's something out there called harm reduction. it takes steps to mitigate the damage that is the drugs in hope of keeping them alive. harm reduction includes needle exchange. they are not sharing needles with somebody else. omthey are not damaging their veins by using needle over and over again. somebody that they are with, they can have the overdose reverse. it'sed safe injection where somebody can go and use under the eyes of somebody who is watching over them.

street drug testing to see what's in the drugs that they are buying, a wonderful organization in hartford called the harm reduction coalition and i write them quite in the book and become good friends with them and not just about harm reduction but about compassion and caring for your fellowman. there's a quote that a lot of people in the harm reduction move use. it's not that we don't want people to be drug free, but dead people don't recover. you have to keep people alive and that is a beautiful thing in itself and some people will -- we will keep them alive to such a point that they can get off drugs and other people will always be on drugs but at least you kept them alive and living in the world and being part of the families and communities. so today rather than just saying just say no, i hand pamphlets to

people. do not use alone. do so in a place where you can be spotted if you're overdose. always have oxycodone available. don't mix opioids and call immediately if a overdose is suspected. i assure them they will not be arrested if they report an overdose. i hear all of t the things. as people get very, very upset, how can we stop people from dying? why are the numbers so high? 18,000 in the last year. there's 2 reasons why people die. first it's that they use alone. our drugs and stigma drive people into the shadows.

when they use alone with nobody to -- most of the people who overdose and die, are not using with a group of friends. they are hidden off in the shadows, behind a locked bathroom door, under a bridge, behind the dumpster some place. you need to not use alone. the second reason is drug supply painted by fentanyl. iin will explain fentanyl in a moment. the problem withem fentanyl is that any dose, even an experienced user. heroin comes in a powdered form and in parts of the west coast something called black tar, heroin which is a sticky sort of substance but in the east coast in connecticut powder and one of the benefits of powder -- of the

rnpowdered heroin or drops, depending on how you look at it, it's very easy to use. you can just snort it because as i mentioned before, your first introduction to heroin is not sticking a big needle in your arm. it's putting it a little bit on your thumb and breathing in. heroin is also extremely cheap. you can buy six bags of heroin for the price of 30-milligram of oxycodone. heroin comes in different bags and they have different names on it. the amountf of spoon is in one bag, 4 to $5. if you go to hartford and they think you're from the country they might charge you $5 and if they know you well 4 and if you

buy 100 you can get for 1.70 a bag. we had a woman and we didn't know what was going on with. let's give her narcan, it was cheaper for her to buy heroin on the street than go to a bodega to buy medicine.so fentanyl is a white powder just like the heroin is a powder. it's indistinguishable from white heroin. there's a heroin that's brownish but when mixed together, you can't see. it's 50 to 100 times stronger of heroin. that doesn't mean it's 50 to 100

times stronger but there's less active ingredient in it. so here imagine somebody is mixing their drugs. if you're just selling heroin, you have 50% heroin and you mix it with cut, by cut, sugar or i baking soda and whatever looks like it and you increase the amount that you have to sell. of 1.1-gram of 50% of heroin, equivalent to 1.1-gram of only 1% pure fentanyl. so as you're mixing things together it's a lot easier to get an even mix when it's 50/50 as opposed 1 to 100. 1 out of 100. and in some cases what happens is people get the fentanyl premixed where it's -- there's a bag that's 10% fentanyl and they mix that with some cut but it's

very difficult for them to get a fine amount so that that we know that they are always getting each bag has the same potency. the other problem with fentanyl is it tends to cut. you get the chocolate chip cookie syndrome. you can get a 4-dollar bag of heroin, of fentanyl, it might not have any fentanyl at all or it could have the chocolate chip cookie syndrome where it's 10% and a lethal dose. i should point out that it is so much more economically viable for the drug traffickers to do fentanyl than heroin. for heroin you have to cultivate, bring the stock across the border because fentanyl it's 50 to 100

sometimes stronger and easier to smuggle and n in hartford right now we talk about airplane but . pretty much every bag, it's just fentanyl. it's just fentanyl. i've had users say to me we can't find heroin anymore. now what's alsong happening with fentanyl is users are now buying pressing machines and they are making their own pills that are -- that are fake pills and this is like a part oxycodone and it's just fentanyl and cut. we recently had this weekend in connecticut. there was quite a number of people overdosed thinking they were taking the normal 30-milligram pill and instead they were taking a pill that was

fentanyl. so here is the look at the overdose deaths since 2012 in connecticut. as you can see, the overdose deaths have just skyrocketed nearly every year. we had a plateau in 2018. 2020 was the worst year ever and it's killing them. all right. i want to read in conclusion, i just want to read a short passage from the book. all right. so one day i was at a community forum and one of the people there was -- brought up the fact of racial disparity saying is it true that people only paying attention to the epidemic now because it's in the suburbs where before it was in the a cities and people didn't care

e.about. and i could understand the person's bitterness. for years people whose cities died and nobody think about addict and poor choices, the epidemic has gained attention in thehe suburbs to the point that people are nowow talking about t pand using their political power to fight on behalf of addicted sonsht and daughters instead of disowning them is not a bad thing. the death in suburbs seem to be improving similar gains are not happening in hart fort. nationwide the epidemic isnn growing in tinner cities. will we as a nation, suburb and city speak out on behalf of all sufferers. there are millions oute there in the cold who need our -- to find their way home and ems says in

all medicine, we have an obligation to honor code and to whatever houses i will enter, i will help the sick. that commitment must apply to all. i have treated overdose cases of all races. i have found people dead alone in cars on a dark street, in city hotel room and underbrush of public park. i have treated overdoses in homes, rich and poor where a patient was found by a loved one. go on any of o the calls and you will neverer again consider any user deserving. she curls on the couch sobbing, she found herself not breathing when she came home from midnight shift. he was on the floor now, the fire department first responders do compressions on bare chest. the man with tattoos, it isn't the stretch to think heroin is the cause. her mother's boyfriend confirms

to us. the man on the floor is a user. they argue about it every day the boyfriend says but he kept using. heroin bags are retrieved from the bathroom and we are working 20 minutes with no response. skin is cold and pup pils and dialation. we remove the airway, place them along with the bags and mom kneels over kissing his face and tears on his old skin. come with me, come with me. [speaking in spanish] >> do not go, do not go. my son, my love, my heart, i love you. [speaking in spanish] >> i standby his feet holding clean white sheet.

i'm motionless.i i wrote this book to bring the sights that i've seen and the storiess of the patients i cared for to the hope the public would change them in the same way it changed me. so many years ago before i came a paramedic, i worked in washington for governor and one of the things he used to say is the a mark of a country is not w well it teaches its poor people but how it teaches its most vulnerable people.mm murphy who was surgeon general and another high post in the new administration said, are we able to live up to that most fundamental obligations we have as human beings to care for one

another? so thanks for listening to my my presentation. i hope i didn't go onto long and i'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. >> thank you so much, peter, that was such a compelling and very enlightening presentation and i have a couple of questions for you and i just -- before we get into w those, i just want to encourage our audience, if you have a question for peter and if you like clarification on anything that he went over in his presentation, you can go ahead and either putit those in the chat or in the q&a and i will filter them up to -- to peter. i -- i just, you know, it's such a heart wrenching circumstance and the book is -- the stories, they are so heartbreaking and one question that i have is how -- how do you cope and maybe how would you encourage those who

have a loved one who is dealing with addiction to cope and, you know, because it impacts so many more people than p just those wo are using, wouldn't you say? >> yes, it's a very, very difficult situation and i think that the thing that people have to understand and it's very, it's very sad and in a lot of cases, there's so little education about what addiction is about. when i went to paramedic school, we didn't learn about addiction or we didn't learn about mental health but in time, you know, you have to learn to recognize that this is a disease. i picked up the one young man who had overdosed and as i learned about this, i was explaining to me him about how this works on the brain and this and that and he looks at me and he goes, you need to talk to my parents because he had been cast out and i think the one thing

that we all have to learn is that we have to engulf people with love and they can be us and in many cases are members of our family, community or loved ones who by poor accident ended up on the other side and we just have to embrace everybody and bring them together. i've often said ife one of my daughters ever became an addict, i wouldn't want her to shoot up at the kitchen table -- i would want her to shoot up at the kitchen table next to me rather than shoot up under the bridge andyo find her three days later. >> what would you say in response to that and a follow-up that i'm just going to ask now is, we talked a lot about just the incredibly gut-wrenching

stories, did you have success stories of people ablef to recover and get back on their ofeet or do you not really see the side of it because of the paramedic aspect? >> yeah, no. you do see that all of the time people will come up to you. this didn't happen to me but another paramedic told me about it. he was sitting in the balancea and a guy came up to him and said, i want to thank you, i want to thank you for what you, meaning ems did for me. i was a drug user, i overdosed, you know, several times and you guys saved me and then he reaches in his pocket and pulls out a picture and it's a picture of him holding a young child. my son would not be here today if not for what you guys did for me. and, again, it's like -- it's about keeping people alive, recognizing that addiction is a disease and we have to do

everything we can to help people a long way to get to the point where they can get helped. we don't treat other diseases as criminal offenses. all the research show that safe injection sites, syringe exchange, that they lead to much better outcomes. that would be my response. >> absolutely. i want to call outl amy's commet in the chat. you know, she also acknowledges that other countries have started using safe-use sites and she hopes one day and wants to thank you for addressing harm reduction in order to help alleviate the stigma around it. >> sure. >> yeah. and so i'd love to hear a little bit about your journey from the workshop, one of the most press

prestigious writing program. >> i always wanted to be a writer but at the same time i a had worked for many years for senator in washington and i would back and forth working for him and going onto working on a job so i could write and then in 1988 when he ran for reelection, he was upset by joe lieberman. i found that i had 30 years of age, i was out of work and didn't know what to do. so i moved up to springfield and had an apartment, above the liquor store and ambulances would go by all of the time and i wonder what the guys were doing and i saw an ad and i

said, i would try that. i went back and i worked for him to become governor and worked for him. but i had caught the bug. i still worked at night in the ems and became a paramedic. we had a big party. we were all standing around talking about what we were going to do and i stood up and i said i'm going to become a paramedic. i can't help people with my words anymore, i will try to help them with my hands. so i really found my true calling. i've been a paramedic in hartford ever since. the benefit of being a writer, it gave me interesting things to write about and this book just sort of after a while, i carry a laptop in the ambulance so that

in between calls, i would write words and i would get amazing stories of the people that i met that the book sort of came together rather easily. >> yeah, absolutely. sounds like your words are still helping people today, you know, hopefully this book will continue to aid in breaking down stigmas around opioid use and addiction and the disease of what addiction is as people read it. little bit about the last page. i think it's the last page. one of the last pages of the book and it is the heroin bags of hartford. can you talk a little bit about that the page? >> the heroin bags of hartford, many of them have the dealer's brand on them and a particular

brand and hype that and people would know it's a predicted strong brand and try to buy it that way. i was sort of fascinated by the different names that they'd come up with. these people are not kidding about -- about the brands they put on. i do have a chapter that some of thei brands were bugs bunny and bags are all over the ground in hartford. we play a game sometimes with my partners, any place, within 50 feet of the ambulance there's a heroin in the ground.

if a kid picks up a bag that has kermit the frog, it can have a horrible outcome. the brands today is more skeleton on them as opposed to the kid stuff. >> absolutely. that's such a great point about the dangers of advertising or, you know, pills that look a certain way that could be attractive to children. i mean, not just pharmaceutical over the counter or prescription pills or in any drug. >> yeah. >> so risky. so what do you see as a path forward? do you think there's a path forward in your opinion with regards to addiction in terms of reducing the number of addicts? >> yeah, well, so these are the -- i have a section where i go

over my -- my sort of plans. you have to endu the criminal prosecution. we spend so much money on the -- on the criminal side.e. we have to stop treating people who use drugs as criminals and treat them as medical patients. we have to have an antistigma campaign. the guy after 9/11, despite what he has done to his country, he thought the country thought him as a scum bag because he was a user. i'm very much a supportere of safe injection sites. they are illegal in the united states but they are doing well in other countries. there's one in hartford where people can go and they go in

there and there's a bathroom and they can use in that bathroom. the difference between that bathroom and the bathroom down the street at the subway or the mcdonalds where we find people dead is they have been in there for too long. this bathroom after 3 minutes, somebody knocks on the door and says how are you doing in there, my friend. if there's an overdose, they are there to correct it. a safe injection site, you can have people using under the eyes of the health professional and talk to them about getting help who can be there to -- to help mentor them. a lot of the people working are great success stories themselves. there are people who, yousu kno, who overcame addiction. so i do, absolutely, support harm reduction. these are the avenues that we need to take. criminal prosecution of war on drugs has been expensive and things are worse off than when

that started. >> yeah. now my final question for you this evening is about the changes in the brain scans that you showed during your powerpoint. >> yes. >> in your research, did you find that those were irreversible changes or can you talk a little bit about those. >> everybody is different. there's some people who their brain has been damaged beyond repair, but there are scans that can show over time that brains do have the ability to recover. if i had a longer time i cut a budge of slides b that i would normally show and i show a difference in time where you can see the improvement in somebody's brain over time when they don't use. so, yes, recovery is possible for some people. for other people it's not and what we want to try to do is we want to keep them alive and not

just cast them on. so it's a hard -- it's a hard thing but, again, we have to treat everybody as family t and bring them in from the cold. >> thank you. >> so as we begin to wrap up, why don't you tell everyone where they can find your blog and if you have any last words that you would like to share with tonight's audience, the floor is yours. >> sure, thank you. i havek a blog that i've been writing for almost 20 years now, it can be found at medicstrive.com but that site has been having problems. sometimes you go there and nothing is up there. i write regularly about -- about the opioid epidemic and issues and i write about covid, what we are seeing out there. i'm on twitter.

i just joined twitter for the first time a few months ago and still learning the ins and out and i'm on medic stride at medic stride. my book can be purchased here and iha hope that you read it or tell people about it and i hope that if you read the stories that you are affected by them in the same way that i was. >> absolutely. thank you so much.te and to our audience if you haven't purchased a copy of killing season i'm dropping the link one more time. peter, thank you so much for joining us and talking about your incredibly moving book and sharing some of the -- the things that you've learned along your journey of education and the -- the tools and harm reduction and just one quick thing, amy, is asking if you are on instagram. are you also on instagram?

>> yes, i am. i'm trying to think what i have -- i have to look at what i have -- i think medic stride might be my thing here. i am on here. i don't -- so i'm a little old -- medicscribe. >> perfect. sounds like your handles are consistent across the board which is great. >> yeah. >> wonderful. to our audience, thank you so much for joiningng us this evend and, again, peter, thank you for coming on. >> thanks for having me and chance to talk about the subjects. >> yeah. >> c-spanshop.org is c-span's online store and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. go there to order copy of congressional directory with contact information for members of congress and the biden administration cabinet.

browse our newest products at c-spanshop.org. >> here is a lack at some of the best-selling nonfiction books. according to book people bookstore in austin, texas, topping the list is michelle's memoir, michael lewis' report on early warning signs of the covid-19 pandemic and trump response in premonition. robin says we should work with rather than shape the land we live on. next amanda gorman, the hill we climb and wrapping up our look at best-selling books is malcolm's look at development of precision bombing during world war ii in the bomber mafia. some of the authors have appeared on book tv and you can watch their programs any time at

booktv.org. >> book tv is television for serious readers all weekend, every weekend. join us again next saturday beginning at 8:00 a.m. eastern for the best in nonfiction books. >> c-span is your unfiltered view by government funded by television companies and more chartered communication. .. this week on the communicated our guest is rep