or if we fought him, if we protested donald trump, that it would somehow address racism and put an end to it. and that's what we mean when we say no, no, this is institutional. if we're going to fight for equal pay, we have to look at it from a perspective that you as a white woman make more than me as a black woman. we are fighting for an institutional problem that has existed for over 400 years since we've been here as a nation. that's what we mean. trust me i'm a work in progress. i asked god every day to help me live by that principle as much as possible. >> you can find the rest of this conversation on-line at book tv% .org. -- book tv.org. search for "the state of the emergency" tamika mallory using the box at the top of the page. i'm delighted to discuss the new book "killing season, a paramedic dispatch from the

opioid epidemic". peter cannon, his first book "paramedic on the front lines of medicine" details his journey to the care giver on the cities. since 2006, peter has been the author of the influential ems blog street watch, notes of a paramedic. he's also a graduate of the iowa writers workshop. he attended an academy in the university of virginia. he's worked many jobs in his life, tennis -- tennis instructor, aid to a u.s. senator, book and author and others before he found his place as a paramedic. he is also ems coordinator at a hospital in connecticut. without further adieu, i would like to welcome peter cannon. hi, peter. hang on, i think -- let me see.

there we go. >> thank you very much. >> thank you for attending. can you talk about your new book "killing season". >> "killing season" is a book that just came out. it is about my experiences as a paramedic over the last 25 years in following the opioid epidemic. as i will get through in my presentation, i will tell you when i started to learn things in the course of my work, and i wanted to bring my experiences and the voices of my patients so they could be changed in the way i was changed in my view. >> thank you very much. i'm looking forward to seeing your presentation. i know our audience is as well. peter is going to share his

screen and go ahead with the presentation. i will be with all of you in the chat. we will come back to audience questions during the second half of the event. >> okay. can you see that okay? >> yeah, we can see your screen. >> all right. let's see here. this is a picture of albany avenue in hartford, where i work. i've been there as a paramedic in hartford for over 25 years, and i've really sort of become very attached to the city. this is a picture i particularly love. i began as a paramedic -- that's a picture of me in 1995, when i started work as a paramedic in hartford. and then that's me a couple of years ago. and the line there is the

national drug overdose deaths. you can see in 1995, while there were over 10,000 people dying in a year in the united states, it's skyrocketed since then. this graph only goes up to 2016, where it's estimating 65,000 people. i just read today the latest data for the 12-month period ending in last august, there was 88,000 people in the united states died of drug overdoses. so when i began as a paramedic, and i handled people who had drug overdoses, i thought that people overdosed on these drugs because they had a character flaw. i would say to them, just say no or you're going to 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 a drug in front of their own children. in addition to being a paramedic, i'm also an ems coordinator at the hospital, so part of that job is reviewing forms from other paramedics. a few years back, i encountered this one. when a paramedic does a call, they fill in a whole bunch of details, and then they write a narrative describing what happened. i am going to read it to you. upon arrival, found a 24-year-old male unresponsive lying on the floor of his bedroom, with his mother performing cpr on him. she states that she last saw him alive an hour ago and then found him on the floor unconscious before calling 911. she states he has a history of heroin abuse and there's a used needle sitting next to him. he's unresponsive with no

palpable pulse, and he's [inaudible], which means he's not breathing. what struck me about this was not that it's a horrible thing, a mother doing cpr on their child, which is a horrible thing, but that this wasn't unusual. this wasn't the first time i'd run across a narrative like this, and i myself had been on several calls that were similar. and i just began to look around and go what is happening? what has come about that these tragedies are so common place? so in looking to find out what was going on, there were two stories. there's the national story. i described it in my book, but it's the national story. it's fairly well known. the opioid epidemic started with the rise of prescription pain pills. the pharmaceutical companies advertised that these pills weren't addictive. a lot of doctors, well meaning,

but, you know, probably hadn't looked into it as well as they should tended to prescribe these quite [inaudible]. as the numbers of pills and more and more pills were made available each year, more and more people began to die of overdoses. about 2010, what happened was there's a pill oxycontin, and what users would do is they would take the pill, and they'd scrape it down to powder, and then they would either snort the powder or they would inject it so they could get a stronger feeling on it. so the pharmaceutical companies under pressure came up with a reformulation of oxycontin so that people could no longer break it down into a powder. it just turned into a goop. for a well-meaning thing, sometimes they lead to unintended consequences. what happened almost immediately with the arrival of the

reformulated oxycontin is people who used to use oxycontin switched to heroin. oxycontin and heroin are basically chemically really much the same. heroin was surprisingly much more widely available and much cheaper than the pills, so we saw another big uprisings in deaths. i will talk about this more later on, we had the arrival of fentanyl, a synthetic drug, a synthetic opioid that's really just devastating the country now with deaths. so there's the national story. but what interested me more was the individual story. as a paramedic, when i respond to a call, you know, a person may not be breathing. you know, there's evidence that they've used an opioid, some of the syndromes that go with that is either they're not breathing or their breathing is very slow. their pupils can be pinpointing.

they can be -- in many cases they are completely unresponsive. so we give them the drug which most people are familiar called naloxone, and it works fairly well, and we bring them back. and then my job isn't over then, because then i take the patient, put them in the ambulance and we drive to hospital. so i have an opportunity to talk to these patients, and as more overdoses were happening, i had more and more people to talk to. i began to ask them, how did you get involved with this? how did you end up where you are? the stories that they told me formed the genesis of this book. as i said before, their stories completely changed the way i viewed the opioid epidemic in people who use drugs. and i wanted to take their stories and share them with people so they would learn what i learned. i want to tell you about three of the patients who i write about in this book. i'm going to take you back in

time to friday night, at a football game of a local high school, halftime, the home team is ahead by a touchdown. the cheer leaders are out on the field. the crowd's all excited. it is a beautiful beautiful night. two cheerleaders are tossed up into the air. they're spinning with tight spirals, way above the crowd. one cheerleader comes down, and they catch her. the crowd cheers. the second leader comes down, and 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 crying daddy, daddy, my back is killing me. we were very careful with her. we put a cervical dollar on her neck, put her on a board and put her on a stretcher and drive slowly to the hospital to try to avoid the bumps. the father rides in the front and keeps looking back, how is she doing? few years later, we get called

for a car accident in downtown hartford, car into a pole. when i get there, slumped over the wheel is a young woman, but it's really a minor accident. there's not like a huge amount of damage to the car. as i open the door to look at her, i see next to her a syringe with a heroin bag that said sweetheart on it. she has tattoos on both of her forearms. she looked vaguely familiar to me. we give her some naloxone and breathe for her with what's called an [inaudible] bag until she comes around. she said 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 out of rehab and they haven't used for a while, they use, and they use the same amount they used to use, and it is too much for them, so they overdose. i used to think when somebody said to me, you know, oh it's the first time i slipped up.

i used to think they were fooling me. but in fact, in most cases, with an overdose, that's quite common. it is somebody who just got out of jail or just got out of rehab or ended a period where they hadn't used drugs for a while. i'm looking at her. and i started talking to her, and i asked, as we do, as we collect our history, what other medical problems do you have? she goes i broke my back cheerleading. i said the name of the town, and she goes yeah, that was me. so i asked her, you know, what had happened to her. well, you know, she had surgery on her back, had a difficult year. she couldn't go to school. she lost a lot of her friends. they gave her a fairly high amount of pain pills, her doctor did. and then after a year, her doctor cut her off. he said you don't need them anymore. but she said to me, i did still need them. what happens is people develop a tolerance and an addiction to

these pills. it is very very hard to just stop taking them. so the sickness that she felt, to battle that, she would buy pills from a friend in high school, but they became very expensive. the pills, 30 milligram oxycodone or percocet goes for $30. it is a dollar a milligram. that can very quickly become very expensive. so the same person who was selling these pills to her had heroin, and he would sell her that. the thing about heroin is -- i will get to this more later on is that it is powder. in this part of the country, in connecticut, it is powder, so it is very easy to just sniff. you don't have to jab a needle into the crook of your elbow. so she started using heroin, and before long she was injecting it. and, you know, her life really fell apart. and she looked at me, and she

said i used to be a normal person. i said, you know, 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 they would have thrown her high into the air, they had caught her and she hadn't fallen? how would the trajectory of her life had been different? she would have gone to the dance that night or would have been, you know, a nice graduation, gone to college, you know, perhaps an engagement, a marriage, a house with a white picket fence and a family. instead all her dreams now were going to a hole in her arm. we get called for a person unresponsive and not breathing in a parking lot of what used to

be a hospital, but it's now a rehab center. the fire department arrives before us, and by the time i get there, this person, this young man is finally coming around and starting to breathe. we get him into the ambulance, and we get him 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. the outstanding warrant was he got caught with a broken tail light at one point in time and he was slumped over in his car. he got out of jail. some friends picked him up. and as a celebration, they gave him one bag of heroin. he thought what will one bag of heroin do to me? keep in mind, he hasn't used for a while. in addition to not using for those 30 days when he was jai -- when he was in jail, he

had actually quit for two months before that. he goes after all i've been through, to almost die like this. and so as i'm taking care of him, i'm putting electrodes on his chest, to monitor his heart rate, and he cinches a little bit. i look, there's a scar there. what is it? it's a bullet hole. i asked him his story. the day after 9/11, he joined the army. he went over to iraq. he was in a humvee accident. there have an ambush, 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 a purple heart. here he's saying to me what a scum bag i am, and i think, you

know, this is a guy who the day after 9/11 went to the service to fight for the rest of us. and yet, he feels today like the world views him as somebody not worthy. when we took him to the hospital, what i always do -- paramedics dictate into the emergency department and then we turn them over into the emergency staff, which is usually paramedics, nurses, who put them in a hospital bed. whenever i bring in a patient from an opioid overdose, i always tell them their story in hopes that it may, you know, get them -- some empathy from them. i told the nurse that night about what had happened to him in the army, her husband was in the reserves. her brother fought in iraq. 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

him. but it's a way i would like to see all people treated. you know, there's a saying we leave no one behind. that should apply not to just those in the military, but to all of [inaudible] in our society. third patient, i write quite a bit about her in this book. when i first met her, i noticed her holding a homeless and hungry sign standing out in the rain. and my partner and i, we carry with us. we carry water on hot days. we carry oranges and fruit and sometimes some spare change to help people out. so we drove by. you know, i started talking to her. i said how are you doing? she said i'm not doing well. i'm really sick. i gave her some change, gave her an orange. we saw her later in the day, and she said she was feeling a little bit better. i saw her again the next week, and i had a chance to talk to her more. i said so how did you get

started doing this? she said that, you know, 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. so at 17 she tried heroin for the first time. she said as soon as i tried it, i understood my mother. so all of these people, you wonder what their lives would have been like if the cheerleader hadn't been dropped, if the young man hadn't, you know, enlisted in the army, or the girl in the rain had had a normal up bringing. despite that, there were still questions that i had to

understand, why knowing how horrible these drugs are to their lives, why do people keep using? so i started asking that question to some scientists. the number of them used the same analogy to describe it to me which i thought was pretty interesting. humans are programmed to eat, have [inaudible] and to take care of their children. when we do these things, our brain releases endorphins that make us feel good. we eat something that's delicious. it is like a firework goes off in our brain. even when we think about having a pizza, we get that feeling of like a firework. the reason that we're programmed to do these things, to have sex, to eat, and to take care of children, it is an evolutionary thing, it ensures our survival as a human race if we do these things. what they said is that heroin,

opioids, when you take those, for some people, rather than one firework going off in their brain, it's like the 4th of july worth of fireworks. the fireworks are so potent and so powerful that in time, they're no longer able to produce endorphins for the things that matter. and it becomes all about getting opioids. what i learned is that addiction is not a character flaw. it is a brain disease, a chronic brain disease. what happens in the brain is when you first use, you get this intoxication where you go oh, this is fantastic. and then in time another part of the brain goes oh, i'm starting to lose the feeling, you know. maybe i should think about how i'm going to get that feeling again. then a third part of the brain

becomes completely preoccupied, i got to get it again. you know, how can i do that? what happens with people who become addicted to opioids is that cycle goes on in their brain, and it eventually rewires the reward pathways. so that it is not having food, it is not having sex, it is not taking care of their kids, it is getting heroin is the key to their survival now. it is very very difficult for them to change that. there's a movie that i saw with my daughter called "inside out". in that movie there are these wonderful characters who live in the person's brain, have wonderful personalities and all battle back and forth at the 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 those other wonderful personalities are still in there. you know, they may be bound and gagged, but they are there and we can't forget about them. a damaged brain whose pathways have been rerequired is a medical problem. if somebody is using drugs, it should not be a criminal problem. it is a medical problem. you can put these people in cat scan machines, and you can see the damage to their brain. it is not an invisible thing. you can actually see it in the same way that you can look at somebody's heart or lungs in a machine and see that there is damage. so to expect that somebody whose reward pathways have been rewired by heroin to constantly make good decisions is akin to

expecting somebody with copd to climb mount everest or someone with a broken leg to run hundred yard dash. very difficult. it is hard to do. so what i started to do, when i started to learn about is you couldn't say to somebody just say no because it's not an easy thing to do, so there's something out there called harm reduction, which i hadn't 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 keeping them alive in such a time that they are ready to recover. harm reduction includes needle exchange, where somebody can have a clean needle so they're not sharing needles with someone else, where they are not damaging their veins by using a needle over and over again.

so somebody that they are with overdoses, they can immediately have that overdose reversed with the naloxone. it is safe injection sites, 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. there's a wonderful organization in hartford called the greater hartford harm reduction coalition. i write about them quite a bit in the book and become very good friends with many of them. they've taught me quite a lot, not just about, you know, harm reduction, but about compassion and caring for your fellow man. there's a quote that a lot of people in the harm reduction use, it is not that we don't want people to not be drug free, but dead people don't recover. we have to keep people alive. that's a beautiful thing in itself. some people we 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 a part of their families and communities. so today rather than saying just say no, i hand out these little pamphlets to people, five points to prevent the fatal overdose and make certain that, you know, do not use alone. if you are going to use alone, do so in a place where you can be spotted if you overdose. always have naloxone available. i tell them where they can get it. when they are using from a new source, just do a little bit at a time. don't do the whole shot. don't mix opioids and benzos, and call 911 immediately if an overdose is suspected. they will not be arrested if they report an overdose. so i hear all these things, you know, as people get very very upset like how can we stop people from buying?

-- 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 911 if they overdose, they can die. most of the people who overdose and die, they're not using with a group of friends. they're hidden in the shadows. they are behind a locked bathroom door, you know, under a bridge. they're behind the dumpster someplace. you need to not use alone. the second reason is a drug supply tainted by fentanyl. i will explain fentanyl in a moment. the problem with fentanyl is that any dose that's poorly mixed can kill even an experienced user.

in connecticut, along most of the east coast, heroin comes in a powdered form. in parts of the west coast, there's something called black tar heroin which is a sticky sort of substance, but in the east coast, in connecticut, it is powder. one of the benefits of the powder heroin, and one of the drawbacks depending on how you look at it, is it is very easy to use. you can just snort it. as i mentioned before, you don't have to -- your first introduction to heroin is not sticking a big needle in your arm. it is putting 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 one 30 milligram oxycodone. now -- heroin comes in these little bags here, and they have different brand names on them. the amount on that plastic spoon is the amount of heroin in one bag. now, a bag typically goes for 4

or 5 dollars. if you go into hartford and think think you are from the country, they might charge you $5. they might charge you 4. if you buy a bundle, which is 10, you might get $35 or $30 for it. if you buy hundred, you can get it for as low as 1.70 a bag. i had an old woman once who was passed out and not breathing, we didn't know what was going on with her. her pupils are pin point. let's give her some narcan, and she came around. she had just gone to the dentist, and her teeth were in pain, and it was cheaper for her to buy heroin on the street than it was to go buy aspirin. many users start snorting heroin and then graduate to iv injections for increased [inaudible]. here's the problem with fentanyl now. fentanyl is a white powder, just like the heroin's a powder. it is indistinguishable from

white heroin. there's also a heroin that's a brownish, but when it gets mixed in together, it is hard to see. it's 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin. now that doesn't mean that one $4 bag of fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger than one $4 bag of heroin. it means there's less active ingredient in it. so here, you know, imagine somebody's 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 it is sugar, baking soda, whatever looks like it, and you mix it up to increase the amount that you have to sell. 1.1 gram bag of 50% pure heroin is equivalent of a .1 gram bag of only 1% pure fentanyl. if you are mixing things together, it is a lot easier to

get an even mix when it is 50/50 as opposed to 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 like 10% fentanyl, and they maybe mix that with some cut, but it is very difficult for them to get a fine amount so that we know that they are always getting -- [inaudible] -- each bag has the same potency. the other problem with fentanyl is it tends to clump. so what happens is you get the chocolate chip cookie syndrome. so you could get a $4 bag of heroin or fentanyl, and it may not have any fentanyl in at all, or it could have the chocolate chip cookie syndrome in it where it is like 10%, a lethal dose. i should point out that it is so

much more economically viable for the drug traffickers to do fentanyl than heroin. heroin, you have to cultivate it. you've got to bring the -- [inaudible] across the border because fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger, it is 50 to 100 times smaller and easier to smuggle. in hartford right now, we still talk about heroin, but the fact is that 90% of the heroin in hartford isn't heroin at all, but it's fentanyl. pretty much every bag, and we test a lot of them. it's just fentanyl. it's just fentanyl. i have had users say to me you can't find good heroin anymore. ::

>> we recently had this in connecticut, there was quite a number of people thinking they were taking the normal milligral and they were taking a different one. so, since 2012, in connecticut, as you can see the overdose skyrocketed every year and will 2018 into 2020 was were separated and fentanyl was killing people. and i want to read i can collusion and just want to read the passage from your book. so one day i was at a community

forum in one of the people there brought the fact that there were racial disparities, is a true that people really paying attention to their epidemic now because is in the suburbs where in the cities, people don't care about it. and that i could understand it the persons bitterness. and for years no one seemed to care about those who through their lives when poor choices. that the epidemic has gained attention suburbs to the point where people not talking about in using that political power on behalf of their addicted sons and daughters. and so to bed thank you. in the suburbs were silent as her children died. and similar things are now happening in hartford, nationwide epidemic is growing in the inner-city. we as a nation's number cities

continue to speak out on behalf of all sufferers. i would like to think and i think this crisis will brings altogether so that we can treat everyone the same. those are out there in the cold and need help finding a way home. in this country in a military have saying that we leave no one behind. we have an obligation to honor the south. and whatsoever i will answer this that commitment must apply to all men treated overdose cases of all races, i found the people dead and alone on cars of backstreet and a cd hotel room and then rush of a private parking i've treated overdoses and homes, rich and poor, where they were found by loved one. in these calls, never again consider any user that would deserve this fate. then curls on the couch solving, and she found her son not

breathing and you came home from her midnight shift. the fire department the first responders did impressions on her chest and the man the jailhouse tattoos on his arm. as is not a stretch to think that the mother's boyfriend confirms this to us, the man on the floor would be using it. they argued about in every day he said but he kept using predict and they found heroin bags on the floor the bathroom and we would be with him for 20 minutes with no response. and his fixed and dilated, we call the hospital to proceed with resuscitation is printed we remove the airway and pads and place them along with him. and now the tears are falling on his cold skin. and she cries, come with me, come with me, and.

[speaking in native tongue] [speaking in native tongue] , and cortisone, and i send my love my heart, i love you. and. [speaking in native tongue] and i stand by his feet. i am motionless. so i wrote this book to bring the facts and i have seen. to the public in hopes that they would change in the same way they have changed me. many years ago before became a paramedic in, i worked in washington from the governor there in the senator into the governor as well they used to say, the mark of the country is not how well it treats its richest people but how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. i think that's a principal that

we need to be left two. and murphy, and the surgeon general now in the administration said, be able to live up to the most fundamental obligation that we have as human beings to take care of one another. so thank you for listening to my presentation. i hope i didn't go on too long and i'm happy to answer any questions you might have. >> thank you so much peter and that was such a compelling and a very enlightening presentation. i have a couple of questions for you and before we get into those, just want to encourage our audiences that if you have a question for peter if you would like navigation on anything that he went over, you can go ahead neither put this in a chat for the q&a and will filter them up to peter it is such a heart

wrenching circumstance in the book is the stories are just, they are so heartbreaking. one question that i have is how do you cope and maybe how would you encourage those of a loved one who is dealing with addiction to coke and because it's past just so many people who are just those who are using wooden to say. peter: yes it is very difficult situation. and i think that the thing that people have to understand it, is that it is very sad in a lot of cases is that there's so little education about what addiction is really about. when i was a paramedic school, there was, we didn't learn about addiction. but in time, you have to learn to recognize that this is a disease. i picked up one young man who'd

overdosed and i sort of learned about this and i was explaining to him about how this works on the brain and this and that they look to me and said, 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 envelop these people with love and recognize it could be us, in many cases are members of our family and our community are loved ones who are just by core accident ended up on the other side or do we just have to embrace everybody and bring them together. and i've often said if one of my daughters are became an addict, i would not want her to shoot up at the kitchen table so i could watch her rather than have her shoot up under a bridge and found three days later by a stranger dead.

>> you talk a lot about harm reduction which i'm sure to a lot of people feels permissive rated load you say in response to that in a follow-up, that i'm just going to ask now is we talked a lot about this incredibly gutwrenching stories, did you have some success stories of people able to recover and get back on the feet are you not really see that side of it because of being a paramedic aspect. it. peter: you do see that, all the time people will come up to you and this didn't happen to me but another paramedic told me about it is that he was sitting in an ambulance and a guy came up to him and said, i want to thank you for what you meaning he did for me, i was a drug user, i overdosed several times and you guys saved me then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a

picture, him holding a young child. this is my son he would not be here today if not for what you guys did for me. and again, it's about keeping people alive and recognizing that addiction is a disease. and we have to do everything we can to help people along the way to get to a point where they can be helped and we don't treat other diseases as criminal offenses. in all the research shows that injections, that they lead to much better outcomes that would be by response. >> absolutely mnemonic callout amy in the chat, she also acknowledges that other countries use the size and she hopes they will appear and she was a thank you for addressing

harm reduction in order to help alleviate the stigma around it yes and so i would love to hear a little bit about your journey from course one of the most strategic writing programs and working for a government and the campaign size, how did you know becoming an emt rated paramedic. peter: so wanted to be a writer but it same time i had worked for many years for him as a senator and i would go back and forth from working to him and working on a jobsite. and i would write and then, in 1988, when he ran for reelection, he was upset by joe lieberman so that i found that 30 years ago, i was out of work and didn't really know what to

do. so i had a partner of above that liquor store and ambulances one go by and i would look out and i would think what are those guys doing so i saw in the paper to be an emt so i thought maybe i'll try that some became an emt and then and then he went for governor so i went back to work for him as a governor and wrote speeches for him. but i had caught the bug so i still rated night as the msi became a paramedic it so when he left office in 1995, when a big party. we are all standing around and we were talk about what we were going to do and i said i am a paramedic. i can help people with my words anymore, i'll try to help them with my hands so i really found my true calling as a paramedic is been my heart ever since.

and i had the benefit of being a writer to give me interesting things to write about in this book gets after a while, so that in between calls, i would write about this to try to understand them. and i would have so many amazing stories of the people that i met that the book, he came together. >> absolutely and it sounds like words are still helping people today but hopefully this will continue to aid in breaking down the stigmas rent opiate abuse and addiction in the disease of what addiction is and as people read it. so tell me a little bit about the last page of the is the last page, one of the last pages of

the book and it is the heroine begs heartbreak and you talk a little bit about the page in the book pretty. peter: so the heroine, they come in these little bags and they have the dealers brand on them right and what in a particular brand it and then people learn that's a particularly strong band, the try to buy it that way. so sort of fascinated by the different names they came up with. and the truth in advertising, and it comes from a brand of heroin. trinity in these people are not kidding about this and i do have a chapter in there about how in some cases some of the brands that they were using bugs bunny,

ms. kitty, and i would tell this because you walk into the park and these bags are all over the ground. play game sometimes with my partners as to any place the ambulance stops, within 50 feet of the amulets there is a hammond bag. and there is a picture of a frog and one of them any there's a whole new outcome to that. and the brands out there now tend to be more with pelicans on them. >> that is such a great point about the dangers of advertising or pills look a certain way and it could be attractive to children about not just pharmaceutical over-the-counter prescription pills but in any drug. it's risky.

so what do you see is 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. peter: so there's a section of my book where i go over my sort of plan, we have to end of the criminal prosecution, we spend so much money on this the criminal side. have to stop treating people at yet to stop treating them as criminals and treat them as medical patients. we have to have the anti-'s stigma and is a stigma alone, some who volunteered after 911, despite all he did for his country, he believed that his country thought he was a scumbag because you did drug user. it drives people into the shadows and very much a

supporter of the injection sites, now they are illegal in the united states what they've done well in other countries but there are right about this, there are places in hartford where people can go. and they go in there and there's a bathroom and they can use that bathroom. in the difference between that bathroom and bathroom down the street in the subway or mcdonald's where we find people dead, they been in there too long in this bathroom after three minutes to 70 knocks on the door they say, how you doing in there my friend. if there's an overdose there the safe injection site, you can have people using end of the eyes of a health professional you talk to them about getting help. they can be there to help mentor them and a lot of the people are great success stories themselves, their people who

overcame addiction. so absolutely i support this. these are the avenues that we need to take, the criminal prosecution on the word drugs is very expensive and are worse off now. >> now my final question for you this evening is about the changes and the brain scans that you've shown during your powerpoint. in your research, you find that those were irreversible changes or without those pretty. peter: everybody is different. are some people who their brains been damaged beyond repair but there are scans i can show over time, the brains do have the ability to recover. if a longer time, covered a bunch of slides that i would normally shown i would talk about this ratio 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 treated for other people, it is not in what we want to try to do is keep them alive and that is just and to not pass them off. and so it is a hard thing. but again, we tried to bring them in from the cold. >> thank you and as we begin to wrap up, why didn't you tell everyone they can find your blog. and have any last words that you would like to share with tonight's audience. the floor shores. peter: thank you, so i have a blog they been writing for about a must 20 years now. it can be found at medic stride. [inaudible]. and i can also be found at medic

stride .com that site is been having problems because sometimes you go there nothing in us of their brother write regularly about the opioid epidemic in about issues. and i write about covid-19 what were seeing out there. on twitter and i just joined twitter the first time a few months ago and he is an out of this. in my book can be purchased through the bookstore here. i really hope you read it and tell people about his. and i hope that you read the stories and - >> did not already purchased a copy of "killing season", you can grab a copy for yourself and will drop in a lake and peter thank you so much for joining us were talking about your

incredibly moving book and sharing some of the things you have learned along your journey of education and the tools and harm reduction in one quick thing, amy is asking if you are on instagram. peter: yes, i am. and trying to think what i have where i have, i think maybe medic stride. i see that i am on there. so yes is there predict. >> it sounds like the handles are consistent across the board which is great. what to our audience thank you so much for joining us this evening and again peter thank you so much. peter: thank you for having me