and all previous "afterwards" interviews at booktv.org. click the "afterwards" button near the top of the page. ♪♪ >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual piece. every saturday american history tv documents american stories. sundays, book tv brings the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including comcast. >> you think is a community center? is way more than that. >> comcast along with these television companies supports c-span2 is a public service. >> his new book, "killing season". the front lines of the opioid

epidemic. peter canning has been a paramedic and the greater hartford area since january 1995 his first book, paramedic on the front lines off medicine details his journey from the government of connecticut to a caregiver on the street. our paramedic story. since 2006, he's been the author of the influential ems street watch, the paramedic. he's a graduate of the iowa workshop, he attended academy and university of virginia and worked many jobs in his life. he was a tennis instructor, taxi driver, michael, telephone and book and movie a reviewer and author before he found a job as a paramedic. without further ado, i'd like to welcome, peter canning. hang on, i think -- one second.

there you go. >> thank you for that introduction and thank you for attending, everyone. >> before we get started, would you tell us about "killing season" for those who might not be familiar with your book? >> this book came out and it's about my experiences as a paramedic over the last 25 years and following the opioid epidemic. i started to learn things in the course of my work, i wanted to bring mys expenses in the voices of my patients into leaders so they could be changed in the way i was changed with the opioid epidemic. >> thank you so much, i'me looking forward to your presentation and i know our audience is as well.

go ahead to 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? >> we can see your screen, guess. >> are right. s let's see here. this is a picture of hartford where i work. i've been there as a paramedic almost 25 years and i've become attached to the city. i deeply love this picture. i began as a paramedic, that's a picture of me in 1995 when i started working as a paramedic and faxed me a couple of years ago.

right there is the national drug overdose death.an over 10000 people die a year in the united states, it has skyrocketed then. 2016 words estimated 65000 people, i just read today the latest data from a 12 month period ending last august, there's 88000 people in the united states dying of drug overdose. when i began as a paramedic, and i handle people like drug overdoses, i thought people overdosed because they had a character flaw. i would say to them just s say o or you're going to end up dead or in jail. i didn't understand how people put willfully inject themselves with the drug i could so easily

kill them. i didn't understand how people could inject themselves of the drug in front of her own children. they seem to be a paramedic, and also at the hospital the part of my job is reviewing from other paramedics. a few years back, i encountered this one. when a paramedic does a call, they do a bunch of these may write a narrative describing whatat happened. i'm going to read it to you. upon arrival, i found a 24-year-old male unresponsive lying on the floor of his bedroom with his mother performing cpr on him. she states she last saw him alive an hour ago and found him on the floor unconscious before calling 911. she states he has a history of heroin abuse there's a a needle

sitting next to him. he's on responsive with no holes, he's not breathing. what struck me about this not that it's a horrible thing of her mother's doing cpr on their child, which is a horrible thing but this wasn't unusual. this wasn't the first time i've run across a narrative like this and i myself had been on so many calls were similar and i just began to look around and say what is happening? what has come about that this is so commonplace? looking to find out what was going on, there were two stories. there's the national story, i described in my book, the nationalt' story that's very wel known. the opioid epidemic started with the rise of prescription pain pills. the pharmaceutical companies advertise the pills were

addictive, a lot of doctors well-meaning but probably hadn't looked into it as well as they should, tended to prescribe these quite liberally. as numbers of pills, more and more pills were made available each year, more and more people begin to die of overdose. about 2010, what happened was there's a pill t oxycontin and what users would do is they would take the pill and scrape it down to powder and they could start the powder or injected to get a stronger feeling so the pharmaceutical company is under pressure, came up with oxycontin so people could no longer break it down to a powder. for well-meaning things, sometimes their unintended consequences. c with the h arrival of oxycontin,

people who used to use oxycontin switch to heroin. oxycontin and heroin are chemically very much the same. heroin was surprisingly much more widely available and cheaper than the pills and result another big uprising. i'll talk about thist more lat, we have the arrival of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that devastating the country now. so there is the national story but what is interesting what was the individual stories. as a paramedic when i responded to a call, a person might not be breathing, there's evidence they've used in opioid, some of the symptoms that go with that, they are not breathing or very slow breathing, pupils can be

pinpoint, many cases are completely unresponsive. we give another drug and it works very well and we bring them back. then my job is and over, i take the patient and put them in the amulets and drive himer to the hospital so i have the opportunity to talk to these patients and i have more and more people to talk to so i began to ask them, how did you get involved with this? how did you end up where you are? the stories they told me in this book, as i said before, there stories completely change the way i viewed the opioid epidemic and people who use drugs and i wanted to take the story and share them with people. about three of the patients i write about in this book, i want

to take you back in time to friday night football game at a local hospital. home team is ahead by a touchdown. the cheerleaders are on thero field, the crowds are excited, it's a beautiful night. two cheerleaders are tossed up into the air, they are spinning tight spirals above the crowd. one cheerleader comes down, they catch her and the crowd cheers. the second cheerleader comes down, they drop her and they are silent. the father comes down from the crowd and an ambulance is called. when i get there, she's lying on the ground, crime, daddy, daddy. we were careful with her, put a collar on her neck and put her on a stretcher and drive slowly to the hospital to avoid bombs. the father rides in the front

and keeps looking back, how she doing, how is she doing? a few years later, they called for a car accident in downtown hartford and when i get there, slumped over then wheel, it's a minor accident, there's not a ofhuge amount of damage to the r and as i opened the door to look at her, i see next to her a syringe, a heroin bag. tattoos on both of her forearms, she looks vaguely familiar to me. we breathe for her with a bag until she comes around and she goes i screwedju up, i just got out of rehab, i was doing so well. what happens to a lot of people, they get out of rehab, they haven't used for a while and then the use and they use the same amount they used to use and then they overdose. i used to think when somebody said to me is the first time i

slipped up, i used to think they were fooling me but in most cases, that is quite common, they just got out of jail rehab may enter the time when they haven't used drugs for a while. i'm looking at her and i start talking to her and and we go through history, what other medical problems do you have? she set i broke my back cheerleading. i said the name of the town and she said itd was me. i asked her what happened to her. they did surgery on her back and had a difficult year end she couldn't go to school, she lost a lot of her friends and they gave her a fairly high amount of pain pills, the doctor did. after a year, her doctor cut her

off and said you don't need them anymore and she said to me, i did still need them. people develop a tolerance addiction to these pills, it's very hard to just stop taking them so the sickness she felt to battle back, she would buy pills from her friends in high school but they became very expensive. 30 milligrams oxycodone percocet goes for $40 and back quickly becomes very expensive. the same person, something about heroin is that it powder in this part of the country, so it's very easy to sniff. you don't have to job a needle and so she started using heroin and before long, she was injecting it and her life felll apart. she looked at me and she said i

used to be a normal person and i remember that. the phrase i used to be a normal person i heard over and over. i often learned with her is what would happen that night when they threw her high into the air, if they had caught her, how would the projector of her life have been different? she would have gone through the dance that night and she would have had a nice graduation, onto college and engagement and a white picket fence and the family. instead, now there's just a hole in her arm. we get calls for a person unresponsive and not breathing

in the parking lot of what used to be a hospital is not a rehab center. the fire department arrived and by the time i get there, the person coming around, starting to breathe. they get into theul ambulance ad set him on the stretcher and he says to me, what a scumbag i am. i was supposed toon take my son trick-or-treating tonight and now look at what i've done he said he's just gotten out of jail, he did 40 days for an outstandingan warrant and the warrant was he got caught with a broken tail light, he slumped over in his car so he got out of jail, they picked him up and as a celebration, they gave him a bag of heroin. what does one bag of heroin due to me? keep in mind, he's not used for a while. when he was in jail, he actually

quit for two months before that so he goes after all i've been through, to almost die like this. so i'm putting electro on his chest to monitor his heart rate and then i a looked and there ia start there, what is it? it's a bullet hole i said what's that story? the dayth after 9/11, he joined the army. he went to iraq, he was in a humvee accident and was an ambush, suffered a brain injury, he got shot so he ended up leaving, he left the army with a horrible addiction to pain pills they had given him and a purple heart. here he is saying to me, what a

scumbag i am and this is a guy who the day after 9/11 went into the service to fight for the rest of us and yet today, he feels like the world view him as somebody not worthy. when he comes into the hospital, paramedics take patients into the emergency department, we get him to the emergency staff which is a paramedic, a nurse, we put him in the hospital bed. whenever i bring in a patient, an opioid overdose, i always tell the nurse their story to hope to get some empathy from them but i told him, i told her, the nurse about what happened to him in the army and her husband was in the reserves and fought in iraq so she went in with most of the er staff that night and said to him thank you for your

service and i was a nice way to treat him but it's the way i would like to see all people treated. we leave no one behind and not should apply to not just those in the military but all people. i write quite a bit in this book about a girl, i noticed her holding a homeless and hungry sign standing in the rain and water on hot days and oranges and fruit and sometimes some change. i drove by and started talk to her and she said she's not doing well. i gave her some change, i gave her an orange and she said she was feeling a little bit better i saw her again the next week and had a chance to talk with her more.

i said how did you get started doing this? she said her mom was 14 when she was born. her mom was a drug user, gave her up, she was raised by her grandmother. she said she always wanted to try heroin but she wanted to know what it was about heroin that made her mom love heroin more than her. ... the girl in the rain had a normal upbringing. stille that, there was questions that i had to

understand. why, knowing how horrible these drugs are to their lives, why do people keep using? i started asking that question and a number of them use the same analogy to describe 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. we think about, it's like when we eat pizza, it's delicious and a firework goes off in her brain. even when you think about having a pizza we get a good feeling of the fireworks. the reason that we are programmed to do these things, to have sex, to eat and to take care of children because it's an evolutionary thing, it ensures our survival as a human race if we do these things.

what they said is opioids, when you take those, for some people rather than one firework going off in their brain, it's like the fourth of july worth of fireworks. 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 opioids. what i learned is addiction is not a character flaw, that it is a brain disease, chronic brain disease. what happens in the b brain is when you first use you get this intoxication where you go this is fantastic. then in time another part of the brain goes i'm starting to lose the feeling, maybe i should think about how i'm going to get

that feeling again. the third part of the brain becomes completely preoccupied, i've got to get it again, how can i do that wax so what happens with people who become addicted to opioids is this cycle goes on in the brain and eventually rewards, it rewires the reward halfway. so that it's not having food. it'sre not having sex. it's not taking care of of te kids. it's getting heroin. it's the key to their survival now. it's very, very difficult for them to change that. there's a movie that i saw many years ago with my daughter called inside out. in c that movie there are these wonderfull characters who live n a person's brain and that wonderful personalities and all out back and forth with the addictive control panel. what happens sometimes when people become addicted to heroin

is another character comes into that brain and takes over the control board. we have to remember no matter how that person acts that there's other wonderful personalities are still in there. they may be bound and gagged but they are there and we can't forget about them. a damaged brain whose pathways have been rewired is a medical problem. someone who'sso using drugs, its a medical problem here you can put these people in a cat scan machine and you can see the damage of their brain. it's not an invisible thing. you can actually see it in the same way you can look at somebody's heart or lungs in the machine and seeet that they are damaged. so to expect that somebody whose reward pathways have been rewired by heroin to constantly make good decisions, expecting

somebody with copd to climb on interest or someone to with a broken lake to run a 100-yard dash. it's very, very difficult to do. so what i started to do, what i struggle to learn about is you couldn't say to somebody just say no, because it's not an easy thing to do. there's something out there called harm reduction which i had not heard of for years but i finally became a disciple of. harm reduction recognizes that people are going to use drugs and it takes steps to mitigate the damages that those drugs do in hopes of d keeping them alive until suchep a time that they ae ready for recovery. harm reduction includes needle exchange where somebody can have a clean needle so they're not sharing needles with someone else or they're not damaging their veins by using a an neee over and over again.

it's community naloxone so they can have the overdose reversed with naloxone. it safe injection sites where somebody can go and use under the eyes of somebody who's watching over them. street drug testing to see what's in the drugs they are buying. there's a wonderful organization at hartford called the greater heart greater hartford and it taught me quite a lot not just about harm reduction but about compassion and caring for your fellow man. there's a quote that a lot of people in the harm reduction move use your 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 keep them alive to such a point that they can get off drugs. other people will always be on drugs but at least you kept them alive and living in the world and being part of their families and communities. these little pamphlets to people. five points to prevent the fatal overdose and make certain do not use alone. if you are going to use alone do so in a place where you can be spotted. always have naloxone available, when their using from a new source, do a little bit at a time. don't do the whole shot. don't mix opioids and ben sows and called 9-1-1 immediately if an overdose is suspected and assure them they will not be arrest if they report an overdose. so, i hear all these things and people get very, very upset, how can we stop people from dying? why are these death numbers so

high? 88,000 in the last year. there's two reasons that people die. the first is that they use alone. our laws and stigma drive people into the shadows. when they use alone, with no one to provide naloxone or call 9-1-1, they can die. most people who overdose and die, they're not using with a group of friends. they're hidden off in the shadows. they're in behind a locked bathroom door. under a bridge. behind the dumpster someplace. you need to not use alone. the second reason is, a drug supply tainted by fentanyl. i'll explain fentanyl in a moment. the problem with fentanyl is that any dose, if poorly mixed, can kill even an experienced

user. so in connecticut, along most of the east coast, heroin comes in a powder form and the parts of the west coast it's called black tar heroin a sticky substance but on the east coast and connecticut it's pods powder and one of the benefits of the powderhorn horn or -- heroin or the drawback, it's easy to use. you can just snort it and you don't have -- your first introduction to heroin is not sticking a needle in-under mayor arm. it's putting a little on your thumb and breathing in. heroin is extremely cheap. you can buy six bags of heroin for the price of one 30-milligram ox -- oxycodone. so the heroin comes in little bags and have different bran nameds on them. the amount of the plastic spoon

is the amount of heroin in one bag. a bag goes for four or five dollars. if you go in hartford and they think your from the country thy might charge you five dollars. if you're known you get charged four. if you buy a bundle you get $30 for it and if you buy 100 you can get is for as low as 1.7 a bag. anymore hard toronto, i had an old woman who was passed out and not breathing and we didn't know what was going on and i thought, okay, puples are pinpoints. let's give her some narcan and she came around. had just gone to the dentist and her teeth were in pain and its was cleaner to get highway hundred on the streets than to buy aspirin. many years start using heroin and then graduate to i.v. injection. so here's the problem with fentanyl now. so, fentanyl is a white powder just like the heroin is a pawed

sore it's indistinguishable from white heroin and there's a heroin that is brownish but it's hard to see. it's 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin that doesn't mean that one for a dollar bag of fentanyl is 50 times -- there's an 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 50% cut, and by cut i mean sugar, baking soda, whatever looks like it and you mick it up to increase the amount you have to sell. 1.1 graham 50% pure heroin is equivalent of a .1-gram back of

fentanyl so it's easier to get an even mix when it's 50-50 as opposed to 1 out of 100. and in some case what happens is people get the fentanyl premixed where it's -- there's a bag that's like 10% fentanyl and they mix that with some cut but it's very difficult for them to get a fine amount so that we know that they're always getting -- each bag has the same potency. [coughing] the other problem with fentanyl is is clump sod you get the chocolate chip cookie syndrome. you could get a four dollar bag of fentanyl and might not have any fentanyl it in at all or could have the chocolates chip cookie syndrome and it's 10% and it's a lethal dote and i should point out that it is so much

more economically viable for the drug traffickers to do fentanyl than heroin. with heroin you have to cultivate it and you have to bring the stock across the border, because fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger it's 50 to 100 times smaller and easier to smuggle. in hart ford right now, we still talk about heroin but the fact is that 90% of the heroin in hartford isn't heroin but it's fentanyl. pretty much every bag and we test a lot of them. it's just fentanyl. it's very hard. user say to me you can't find good heroin anymore. now, what also happening with fentanyl is dealers are buying pressing machines and they are making their own pills that are fake pills, and there's the -- this is like a -- it's not

percocet or oxycodone and it's custody. s have hads quite a people overdosing thinking they're taking their normal 30-gram pill and instead it was counterfeit fentanyl. so there's a look at the overdose deaths since 2012 in connecticut. you can see the overdose death have just skyrocketed nearly every year. we had a plateau in 2018, 2020 was the worst ever and the green line this percent of edition west virginia fentanyl involved. so it's killing people when they're using alone. i want to read a -- in conclusion, i just want to read a short passage from the book. so, one day i was at a community forum and one of the people

there was brought up the fact that of a racial disparate where, it true that people are only paying attention to the epidemic now because it's in the suburbs and before it was in the cities and people didn't care. and i could understand that the person's bitterness. for years people in the cities died and no one seemed to care but the addicts and junkies who threw their lives away with for poor choices. the the panel has gained attention in the suburbs to the point that people are tacking up about it and using their political power to fight on pa of their addicted sonses and daughters is not a bad thing. noer uses the suburbs were silent as their high-died while the death rite in suburbs seems to be improving similar gains north happening in hartford. nationwide the epidemicsing growing in the inner cities. where we as a nation, suburb and

city, continue to speak out on behalf of all sufferers is 0 week to think this crisis will bring us together so we can treat everyone the same. millions in the cold who need our help to find their way home. this country and our military have a situation we leave no one behind. and ems says we have an obligation to honor the oath. whatever -- i answer to help the sick. that commitment must apply to all. i have treated over those cases of all races, i have found people dead aflown carbon dark street in a seedy hotel room and the underbrush of a public park. if have treat overdoses in homes, rich and poor, where the patient was found by a loved one. go on, any of those calls and you'll never again consider any user deserving of their fate. she curls on the couch, sobbing. fund her son not breathing when he came home from their midnight

shift. he is on the floor n95 mask first department first responders do compressions. the man is lean and muscle if wisdom jailhouse tattoos on his arms, chess and next. sit isn't a stretch to think that heroin is the cause. his mother's boyfriend confirms this to us. the man on the floor was a user. they argued about it every day, the boyfriend says, but he kept using. heroin bags were retrieved from the floor in bathroom. we work on him 20 minutes without response. we call the hospital for permission to cease resuscitation. itself is granted. we remover the airway, electrodes electrodes and pads and replace them in the bag the am buie bag came. in his mom kneels over hims now, kissing his face, her tears following on his cold skin. she cry, come with me, comp with

me. do do not go, do not go. my son, my love, my heart, i love you. i stand by his feet, holding a clean white sheet. i am motionless. i wrote this book to bring the sights i've seen and the stories of the patients i cared for. to the public and hopes that it would change them in the same way they changed me. many years ago with payment a paramedic i worked in washington for governor riker when he as senator and then governor. and he used to say the mark of a country is note how well it treats its richest people but how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. and i think that's a principle

we need to live up to. and the immigranty the surgeon journal and now it's at -- are we able to live up to that most fundamental obligations we have as human beings to care for one another? so, peace to all and thank you for listening to my presentation. hope i didn't go on too along and aim happy to answer any questions you might have. >> thank you so much, peter. such a compelling and very enlightening presentation, and i have a couple of questions for you and i just -- withbe get to those i want to encourage our audience, if you have a question for peter, if you loo like characterization on his he went over in his presentation, go ahead and either put those in the chat or in the q & a and i'll filter them up to peter. i just -- it's such a

heart-wrenching circumstance and the book is -- the stories are just so heartbreaking, and one question that i have is, how do you cope and maybe how would you encourage those who have a loved one who is dealing with addiction to cope and -- because its impacts so many more people than just those who 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 sad in a lot of cases is that there's so little education about what addiction is really about. when i went to paramedic school there was -- we didn't learn about addiction. we knew nothing but mental health. but in time you have to learn to recognize that this is a disease. i picked up one young man who

had overdosed and dish learned boulevard this stuff. i was complaining to him how this works on the brain and this and that 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 envelope these people with love and recognize it could be us. they could be in many cases are members of our family or community or loved ones who just by poor accident ended inon the other side. and we just have to embrace everybody and bring them together. i have often said if one motor vehicle daughter became an addict i would want her to shoot up at the kitchen table next to me so i could watch her rather than her shoot up under a bridge and be found dead by a stranger throw days later. >> sure. you talked but the harm

reduction which i'm sure to some people feels a bet permissive. what would you say in response to that, and a followup that i'm just going to ask now is, we talked about just these incredibly gut wrenching stories. did you have some success stories of people able to recover and get back on their feet or do you not see that side of it because as the paramedic speak aspect? >> you see at. all the time people come up to you -- this didn't happen to me but another paramedic told me about it. he was sitting in the ambulance, 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. he goes i was a drug user, overdosed several times and you guys saved me. and then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a picture and it's a picture of him

holding a young child. my son would not be here tied if not for what you guys did for me. there are 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 along the way to get to a pint where they can be helped. we don't treat other diseases as criminal offenses. and all the research shows that safe injection sites, syringe exchange, they lead to much better outcomes. that would be my response. >> absolutely. just want to call out amy's comment in the chat, she also acknowledges that other countries have started using safe use sites and she hopes they will here as well one day and wants to thank you for addressing harm reduction in

order to happen alleviate the stigma around it. >> sure. >> and so i love to hear a little bit about your journey from the iowa writers workshop if one. the most prestigious writing programs and working in government. how did you become a paramedic? >> so, i also wanted to be a writer, but at the same tie i had worked for many years for riker when he was a senator in washington and i would go back and forth between working for him to going off and work on a job so i could write. and then in 1988, when he ran for re-election, he was upset by joe lieberman. so i found i had 30 years of age i was out of work, and i didn't really know what to do.

so i moved up to springfield and had an apartment on the main street above the liquor store, and the ambulances would go by and i would look at out and go i wonder what those guys are doing and i sea an ad in the paper to be an emt and i decided to try that. i became an emt and then riker ran for a governor and i went back and worked for him to become governor, and worked for him and wrote speeches for him but i had caught the bug, so i still work at night in the ems and i became a paramedic so when he left office in 1995, we had a big party, and we're all standing around and talking about what we are going to do and i said i'm going to become a paramedic, and it was like -- 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 to being a writer gave me interesting things to write about. and this book just sort of after a while -- i carry a laptop with me in the ambulance so in between calls i'll write about the calls i've had to try to understand them and i was getting so many amazing stories of the people that i met, that the book just sort of came together rather easily. >> absolutely. well, it sounding lie your words are helping people today. hopefully that's book will continue to aid and breaking down stigmas around opioid use and addiction and the disease that addiction is as people read it. so, tell me a little bit about the last page -- i think it's the last page -- someone of the last pines the book, and it is

the heroin bags of hartford. can you talk about that page? >> yes. so, the heroin in hartford comes in little glassy glassine snowfalls and have the dealingers brand on them and the dealer puts at particular brand and try to hype that and people learn it's a particularly strong brand, they'll try to buy it that way. and i just -- sort of facinated by the different names they come up with. if you're talked about truth in advertising, the reaper, killing season the name of the book comes from a brand of heroin out there. people are not kidding the braineds they put out. have a chapter i got some brands they were using, kerr milted the frog, bugs bunny, miss kit kitty

and i was upset because a kid its walking in a park -- these bags are all over the ground in hartford. we play a game sometimes with my partners is that anyplace the ambulance stops within 50 feet there's a heroin bag on the ground and if a kid picks up a bag and has kerr -- kermit the frog and thinks it's powders sugar it's a horrible outcome. the brands now tend to be more with skeletons on them as opposed to kids stuff. >> that's such a great point about the dangers of advertising or pills that look a certain way that can be attractive to children. not just pharmaceutical over the counter or prescription pills nut in any drug. so risky.

so, what do you see as a path forward? do you think there's a path forward? your opinion with regards to day, in terms terms of reduce -- addiction in terms of reducing the number of addicts. >> in in book i go over my sort of plan. you have to end the criminal prosecution of the war on drugs. we spent so much money on the criminal side. we have to stop treating people whoa use drugs as criminals and treat them as medical patients. we have to fund antistigma campaigns. it's the stigma alone, as i mentioned the guy who volunteered after 9/11, despite all he had done for his country he believed his country thought he was scum bag because he was knew a drug user. stigma and draw drive people in the shadows and use alone and

die. i'm a supporter of the safe injection sites. there are safe injection sites are illegal in the united states but they have done very well in other countries but there are -- i write -- there are places and there's one in hartford where people can go and they go and there's a bathroom, and they can use in that bathroom. this difference between that bathroom and the bathroom down the street at the subway or mad mcdonald's where we find people dead and this bathroom after three minutes somebody knocks on the door and says, are how're -- how are you doing in there, friend? and if there's an overdolce they can correct it. a safe injection site you can have people using under the i'd a health professional and talk too them about getting help, can be there to help mentor them, but a lot of the people working on harm reduction are great success stories themselves. people who overcame addiction.

so i do -- absolutely support harm reduction. these are the avenues that we need to take, the criminal prosecution in the war on drugs has been very expensive and things are worse off now than when that started. >> my final question for you this evening is about the changes in the brain scans you showed during your power point. in your research did you find those were irirreversable changes. >> everybody is different. there's some people who their brain has been damaged beyond repair, but there are scans that show over time that brains have the ability to recover. if i had longer time i would -- i cut a bunch of slides normally show, where 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 off. so, it's a hard thing, but we have to treat everybody as family and bring enemy in from the cold -- bring them in from the cold. >> thank you. 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 you would like to share with tonight's audience. the floor is yours. >> sure. thank you. so i have a blog that i have been writing for, oh, probably almost 20 years now, it can be found at medicstrive.com dom

or medicsdrive.com and sometimes nothing is up there but i write regularly about the opioid epidemic and other issues. i write about covid, what we're seeing out there. i'm on twitter, just joined twitter a few months ago and still learning the ins and outs but i'm on medics drive. and my book can be purchased through the book store here, and it's -- i really hope that you read it or tell people about it. i hope that if you read the stories that you are affected by them in the same way i was. >> absolutely. su to much and to our audience if you heart already purchased a copy of "killing season" you can grab copy for yourself or the link is in the chat and thank you for joining us and taking

about your incredibly moving back and sharing the things you learned along your journey education and the tools and harm reduction and i'm just one quick thing. army is something if you're an instagram? >> yes, i am. i'm trying to think what i have dish have to look what i have -- i think maybe medics drive might be my thing here. let me see. i am on there. i think meta-scribe might be be my thing here. i am on here. i don't -- i'm a little, a little bit -- medic scribe. >> perfect. it sounds like your hands are consistent across the board which is great. wonderful. to ourr audience thank you so much for joining us this evening and again peter, thank you so much for coming on. >> thanks for having me. i appreciate the chance to talk about this subject.

>> c-spanshop.org is c-span's online store. there's a collection c-span products. browse to see what's new. your purchase will support our nonprofit operations and you still of time to order the congressional directory with contact information for members of congress and the biden administration. go to c-spanshop.org. >> i am lisa hillman. welcome to the 18th annapolis book festival. special thanks to the school for core dating the festival and thanks all of our sponsors and anonymous donors helping to underwrite this. a couple of reminders. first of all they should be a green question button at the bottom of your screen. as we proceed today with our excellent authors please feel free to write your question in there and as we get near the end of our session will do our best to answer your questions.