ed at booktv.org. >> i'm delighted to introduce >> i am delighted to introduce peter to introduce his new book. peter has been a paramedic in the area since january 1995 his first book paramedic details his journey from the governor of connecticut to the caregiver on a city street a paramedic story since 2000 sixties the author of the influential blog street watch notes of a paramedic and also a graduate of the iowa writers workshop and attended the

academy at university of virginia working many jobs in his life as a tennis instructor meatpacker line cook telephone solicitor book and movie reviewer and author before he found his life as a paramedic in addition the ms courtr nader at the hospital and burlington connecticut let's welcome peter. hi peter. there you go. >> thank you for that wonderful introduction and thank you for attending. >> thank you for joining us. before we get started tell us about killing season if they are not familiar with your new book. >> killing season is a book that just came out and it is about my experiences as a paramedic the last 25 years following the opioid epidemic.

and once i get through in my presentation i will tell you the things i've learned in the course of my work and i wanted to bring my experiences and the voices of my patients to other readers so they can be changed in the way i was changed in my view about the opioid epidemic. >> thank you so much i'm looking forward to seeing your presentation so go ahead and screen on —- share your screen i will be in the chat and then we will come back to audience questions. >> this is a picture in hartford where i work i have

been there as a paramedic over 25 years i've become very attached. so i began as a paramedic that's a picture of me and 1995 when i started to work as a paramedic in hartford and then me a couple of years ago. the line there is the national drug overdose death so in 1995 there was over 10000 people dying per year in the united states but it has just skyrocketed since then so in 2016 it is estimated 65000 people i just read today for the 12 month period ending last august 88000 people in the united states died of drug

overdoses. handling people who have drug overdoses i that people overdose and use drugs because there was a character flaw just say no you will end up dead or in jail. i did not understand how people we —- people can willfully inject themselves with a drug that could easily kill them. i did not understand how people cannot inject themselves o in front of their own children so i'm also the coordinator d so part of that is looking at forms from other paramedics and i encountered

so looking at a bunch of details describing what happened so upon arrival the 25 -year-old male found unresponsive where his mother was performing cpr on him she states she last saw him alive one hour ago then found him on the floor unconscious before calling 911 she states he has a history of parowan abuse any use needles sitting next to him. he ised unresponsive with no polls and is not breathing. so what struck me about this was not that it's horrible thing which is that this wasn't the first time i have run across a narrative like this and i've also been on similar calls but then they begin to look around and think what is happening?

what has come about that the's tragedies are so commonplace? so looking to find out what was going on there are two stories. the national story that i describe it in my book it is fairly well-known. the opioid epidemic started with the rise of pain pills the pharmaceutical companies advertise thats these pills were not a deck on —- addictive if they hadn't looked into it as well as they should tended to prescribe these.an as the numbers are made available each year more and more people began to die of an overdose in 2010 what happened with oxycontin what users would do they waited put into

powder and snorted or injected. so the pharmaceutical companies came up with a reformulation so that just turned into the group sometimes it leads to unintended consequences so the arrival of oxycontin people used to use oxycontin oxycontin heroin are very much the same here when is surprisingly much more widely available and much cheaper than the pills. and then i will talk about this more later on with the arrival of sentinel a synthetic drug thatta is just devastating the country now

with death. so there's the national story but what interested me was the individual story so as a paramedic, when i respond to a call a person is in breathing and there is evidence to use the opioid and one of the syndrome they are not reading our agonal breathing which is very slow it can pinpoint in many cases they d are unresponsive so those that they are familiar with so we would bring them back then my job isn't over because then we have to drive to the hospital. so then i had more more people to talk to so i began to ask them how did you end up where you are?

the stories that they told me from the genesis of this book the stories completely change the way i view the opioid epidemic and i want to take their stories and share them with people i want to tell you about those three patients i write about in the book so i will take you back in time to friday night at a football game at a local high school the cheerleaders are on the field the crowd is excited to beautiful night to cheerleaders are tossed into the air they are spinning with tight spirals one cheerleader comes down a catcher. the second one comes down and a dropper.

there is silence and the father comes down from the crowd and the ambulance is called she's lying on the ground crying my back is killing me. daddy. so we are very careful with her and then me drive slowly to the hospital to avoid the bumps we keep asking how is she doing? two years later there is a call for aoe car accident in downtown hartford so when we get there slumped over the wheel is this young woman really it's a minor accident there's not a huge amount of damage to the car so i open the door to look at her as he next tooi her a syringe of here when that says sweetheart with rose tattoos on those forearms

and looks vaguely familiar we breathe for her until she comes around. she says i screwed up i just got out of rehab i was doing so well so what happens when they get out of rehab they use and they use the same amount they used to use so they overdose when somebody says theyi slipped up but in most cases it is quite common is somebody just get out of jail or rehab they enter the period. so i am looking at her so what other medical problems do you have quick she said it broke my back cheerleading. i said the name of the town

and she said yes. that was me. so i asked her what happened she had surgery on her back. she had a difficult year she couldn't go to school. she lost friends they gave her a high amount of pain pills and then after a year the doctor cut off and said you don't need them anymore but she saidth i did but then people develop a tolerance and an addiction and it's very hard to stop s taking them. so the success that she felt so should by pills from her friends in high school that became very expensive so the 30-milligram oxycodone or percocet that can become very expensive so theer same person would buy heroin.

so i will get to this more later on but in this part of the country the powder is easy to sniff you have to jab the needle into your elbow she started to use heroin and then she was injecting it and then her life literally fell apart. she looked at me and said i used to be a normal person. i remember that. that i used to be a normal person i heard over and over. but i often wondered with her is what would've happened that night if they had caught her and she did not fall how would the trajectory of her life in different quick she would have gone to the dance that

night, the next graduation and on to college or a marriage and a house with a white picket fence and a family but instead all her dreams now have holes in them. . . . . oute

he got caught with a broken tail light so he got out of jail, some friends picked him up, and as a celebration, they gave him one bag of heroin and he thoughf what will one bag do to me. he hasn't used for a while and for thele days when he was in jl he had actually quit for two months before that. so he goes after all i've been through to almost direct -- putting electrodes on his chest to monitor his heart rate and there isis a scar. it is a bullet hole. i asked him his story. the day after 9/11, he joined the army. he went to iraq and was in a

humvee accident, and ambush and suffered a brain injury. he got shot and ended up leaving the army with a horrible addiction to pain pills they had given him and with a purple heart and here he is saying to me what a scumbag i am and i'm thinking here isth the guy the y after 9/11 went to fight for the rest of us and feels today like the world views him as somebody not worthy. when paramedics take patients ninto the emergency department and turned them over to the emergency staff, which is usually when a paramedic talks to the nurse and put them in a hospital bed -- when i bring in a patient from an overdose i always tell the nurse their

story in hopes that it may get some empathy from them. i told the nurse that night about had happened to him in the army. her husband had been in the reserves and her brother fought in iraq. so she went into the room with most of the er staff that night and said to him thank you for your service. it was a nice way to treat him, but it's the way i'd like to see all people treated. it s goes without saying we leae no one behind, and that should apply not tour just in the military, but all people in our society. third patient, i write quite a bit about her in the book. when i first met her, i noticed her holding a homeless and hungry sign standing out in the

rain. my partner and i we carry water and sometimes spare change to help people out. we drove by and i started otalking to her and his head how are you doing. she said i'm not doing really gwell. i'm sick. so i gave here some change and gave her an orange. i saw her later in the day and she said she was feeling a little bit better. i saw her the next week and had a chance to talk with her more. i said how did you get startedr doing this. she said that her mom was 14 when she was born. her mom was a drug user that gave her up for heroin. she was raised by her grandmother. she said w that she always wantd 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 i tried it, i

understood my mother. so like if a young man hadn't enlisted in the army, if the girl in the rain had a normal upbringing. 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 of some scientists, and a number of them used the same an analogy to describe it to me, which i thought was pretty interesting. so, humans are programmed to eat, have sex and take care of their children. when we do these things, our brain releases endorphins that make us feel good.

if a firework goes off in our fibrain, even if we think about having pizza, we get that good feeling of the firework. the reason that we are programmed to do these things, to have sex and take care of children, it is an evolutionary thing that ensures our survival as a human race if we do these things. now 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 fourth of july worth of fireworks. the fireworks are so potent and 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 that it isn't

a character flaw, it is a brain disease. a chronic brain disease. what happens in i the brain is when you first use, you get this binge intoxication where you go this is fantastic. and then in time, another part of the brain goes i'm starting to lose the feeling. you know, maybe i should think about how i'm going to get that feeling again. and then the third part of the brain becomes completely preoccupied. i've got to get it again. you know, how can i do that? so what happens when people become addicted to opioids as there is a cycle going on in their brain that eventually rewires the reward pathways so that it's not having food, having sex, it's not taking care of their kids -- it's having heroin, 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. it's called "inside out." in the movie there are these wonderful characters that live in the person's brain. wonderful personalities and they battle back and forth on the control panel. what happens sometimes when people become addicted to heroin is another character comes into the 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. 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. drugho use, somebody using drugs that shouldn't be a criminal problem. it's a medical problem.

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 that you can look at somebody's heart and lungs in a machine to see that they are damaged. expect that somebody whose 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 a 100-yard. it's very difficult. it's hard to do. so, what i started to do, i started to learn about is you can't say to somebody just say no, because it isn't an easy thing to do. there's something out there called harm reduction, which i haven'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 of the drugs in hopes of keeping them alive until such a time that they are ready for recovery. harm reduction includes needle exchange, where somebody cany' have a clean needle so they are not sharing needles with someone else or damaging their veins by using a needle over and over again. it's the ability to get naloxone so that if somebody they are with overdoses, they can immediately have that overdose reversed. it's safe injection sites, where somebody can go and use under thes eyes of somebody watching over them. street drug testing to see what kind of drugs they are buying. there's a wonderful organization in hartford called the reduction coalition. i write about them quite a bit in the book and have become very good friends with many of them.

they've taught me quite a lot, not just about harm reduction, but about the passion and caring for your fellow man. there is a quote thatuo a lot of people in the harm reduction move used. it's not that we don't want people to be drug-free, but dead people don't recover. we have to keep people alive, and that is a beautiful thing in itself. some people, you will keep them alive at 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. 5 points to prevent a fatal overdose. do not use a loan. if you are going to do so, do in a place you can be spotted if you overdose. always have naloxone available.

i tellng them where they can get it. if they are using it from a new source, do a little bit at the time, don't do the whole shot. don't mix opioids with benzos and call 911 immediately if you expecthe an overdose and assure them that they will not be arrested if they report and overdose. i hear all these things and people get upset like how can we stop people from buying? why are the numbers so high? 88,000 in the last year. there's two reasons that p peope die. the first is that they use alone. the laws and stigma drive people into the shadows. when they use alone, with no one to provide naloxone or call 911 of the overdose, they can die. 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 or, you know, behind a dumpster someplace. you need to not use alone. and the second reason is drug supply tainted by fentanyl. i will explain that in a moment. the problem with vent and all is any dose, if poorly mixed, can kill even an experienced user. so in connecticut and much of the east coast, heroin comes in a powder form. in parts of the west coast there's something called black tar heroin, which is a stickyt sort of substance but in the east coast and connecticut, it's powder. and one of the benefits of powder heroin, depending on how you look at it, is it's very easy to use. you can just snort it. as i mentioned before, your first introduction to heroin isn't sticking a big needle in

your arm. it's 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 to 30 milligrams oxycodone. so, that's -- heroin comes in these little bags and have different brand names on them. the amount on the spoon is the amount of heroin in one bag. a bag typically goes for four or five dollars. if you go to hartford and they think you're from the country, they might charge you five dollars. if you are well known, they might charge you less. if you buy a bundle of ten, you might get $35 or $30 and if you get 100 you can get it for as low as one to 75 the bag. there is people in hartford, there was p an old woman who was passed out and not breathing. we didn't know what was going on with her and i thought her pupils are a pinpoint.

let's give her some narcan and she came around. she described to the detectives she was in pain and it was cheaper to buy heroin than to go in and buy aspirin. many users start snorting heroin and then graduate to iv injections to increase. so, here's the problem with fentanyl. fentanyl is a white powder, just like heroin is a powder, so it's indistinguishable from white heroin. there's also heroin that's brownish and when it's mixed in together it's hard to see. itim is 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin. that doesn't mean that a four-dollar bag of fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger than a four-dollar bag of heroin. it means that there's less active ingredients. so, here you know, imagine somebody is mixing their drugs. if you are just selling heroin do you have 50% heroin and mix

it with 50% cut and, i mean, it's sugar, baking soda, whatever looks like it and you mix it up to increase the amount you have to sell. 1.1-gram 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 1-100. and in some cases, what happens is people get the fentanyl premixed, where there is a bag and it's like 10% fentanyl and you mix that with a cut but it's a difficult for them to get a fine amount so that we know that they are always getting -- that 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 four-dollar bag of heroin mixed with fentanyl and it might not have any fentanyl in it at all or it could have the chocolate chip cookie syndrome where it's like 10%, which is a lethal dose. and i should point out it's so muchca more economically viable for drug traffickers to do fentanyl than heroin. for heroin, they have to get it cultivated, you've got to bring the stock across the border because fentanyl is 50-100 times stronger it is 50-100 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 is an heroin at all, but it's fentanyl. pretty much every bag.

and we test a lot of them. it's just fentanyl. it's hard.an i've had users say to me we can't find good heroin anymore. now, what's also happening with fentanyl is users are now buying machines and making their own pills that are fake bills. between percocet and oxycodone and it's not percocet or oxycodone it is just fentanyl and cut. this weekend in connecticut, there was quite a number of people overdosed thinking they were taking their normal 30-milligram pill, and instead they were taking a pill that was counterfeit fentanyl. so, here is a look at the overdose deaths since 2012 in connecticut. as you canhe see, the overdose h deaths have skyrocketed every year. we had a little plateau in 2018.

2020 was the worst ever. the green line is the% of deaths that had fentanyl involved. so it is what's killing people and it's killing them when they are using alone. i want to read in conclusion i just want r to read a passage fm the book. so, one day i was at a community forum and one of the people brought up the fact of the racial disparity saying is it true people are only paying attention to the epidemic now because it is in the suburbs where before it was in the cities and people didn't care about it? i could understand the person's bitterness. for years, people in the cities died and no one seemed to care about the addicts and junkies that through their lives away

with poor choices.el the epidemic has gained attention in the suburbs to the point people are now talking about it and using their political power to fight on behalf of their addicted sons and daughters. for years the suburbs were silent as their children died while the death rate in suburbs seems to be improving, similar is not happening in hartford. nationwide, the epidemic is growing as in many other cities. will be as a nation continue to speak out on behalf of all suburbs? i would like to think that this crisis will bring us all together so that we can treat everyone the same. there are those out there in the cold who need our help to find their way home. this country and our military have a saying that we leave no one behind. [inaudible] we have an obligation to honor this oath. i will enter to help the sick and that commitment must apply to all. i've treated overdose cases of

all races. i found people dead alone in cars, on the dark street, in city hotel rooms and underbrushe of public parks. i've treated overdose is in homes, rich and poor, where the patient was found by a loved one. going on any of these calls and you will never again consider any user deserving of their fate. she curls on the couch sobbing. she found her son not breathing when she came home from her midnight shift. he's on the floor now with firefighters and first responders doing compressions on his chest. the man has jailhouse tattoos on ohis arms, chest and neck. siit isn't a stretch to think heroin isoi the cause. a mother's boyfriend confirms the man on the floor was a user. they arguedd about it every day, the boyfriend says, but he kept using. heroin bags are retrieved from the floor of the bathroom. we work for 20 minutes with no response.

his skin is cool, pupils fixed and dilated. we call the hospital for permission to cease resuscitation and it is granted. we remove the electrodes and defibrillator pads and place them along with our gloves and the bag that came in. he kneels over now kissing his face, her tears falling on his skin.. she cries come with me, come with me. do not go, do not go. my son, my love, my heart. i love you. i stand by his feet holding the clean white sheets. i am motionless. i wrote this book to bring the sites that i've seen and stories of the patients that i've cared for to the public in hopes that they would change them in the

same way that they've changed me. many years ago before i became a paramedic i worked in washington for the governor when he was a senator. 1 of the things he used to say is the mark of a country is not how well it treats its richest people but how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. and i think that is the principle we need to look to. murphy, who was a surgeon general and now is another high post in the administration said are we able to live up to that most fundamental obligation we have as human beings, to care for one another? so, peace to all and thanks for listening to my presentation. hope i didn't go on too long. i'm happy to answer any questions thates you might have. >> thank you so much, peter.

that was such a compelling and very enlightening presentation. i have a couple of questions for you. w before we get into those, i want nto encourage the audience. we have a question for peter if you would like clarification on anything he went over in hisnd presentation, you can go ahead and either put those in the chat or the q-and-a and i will filter them up to peter. i just, you know, it's such a heart-wrenching c circumstance. in the book, the stories are just so heartbreaking. 1 question that i have is how do you cope, and maybe how would you encourage those who have a loved one who's dealing with addictionpe to cope, because you know, it impacts so many more people than just of those that are using, wouldn't you say? >> it is a very, very difficult

situation. and t i think the thing people have to understand, it's very sad in a lot of cases is that there's so little education about what addiction is about. when i went to paramedic school, we didn't learn about addiction, we learned about 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 because i sort of learned about the stuff, i was explaining to him about how this works on the brain and this and that. he looks at me and goes you need to talk to my parents. i think the one thing that we all have to learn is that we have to envelop these people with love and recognize that it could be us. they could be and in many cases are members of our community or loved ones who just buy a poor

accident ended up on the other side. we have to embrace everybody and bring them together. i've often said if one of my daughters ever 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 two or three days later. >> alsure. i know you talked a lot about harm reduction, which i'm sure to some people feels a bit permissive. what would you say in response to that? and a follow-up that i'm just going to ask now is you talked a lot about these incredibly gut wrenchingom stories. did you have success stories of people that were able to recover and get back on their feet, or do you not really see that side of it because of the paramedic aspect? >> no, you do see that. all the time, people come up to

you -- this thing didn't happen to me but another paramedic told me about it. he i was sitting in an ambulanc, 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 it 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, and it's a picture of him holding a young child. he said my son wouldn't 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 along the way to get to a point where they can be helped. we don't treat other diseases as criminal offenses. although research shows safe

injection sites, syringe exchange, they lead to much better outcomes. so that would be my response. >> absolutely. i want to call out amy's comment in the chat, and if she also acknowledges that other countries have started using safe use sites and she hoped that they will hear as well one day. she wants to thank you for addressing harm reduction in order to help alleviate the stigma around it. yeah, and so i love to hear a little bit more about your journey from the writers workshop, which is one of the most prestigious writing tiprograms, and working for government and campaign sites. how did you end up becoming an emt paramedic? >> so, i always wanted to be a writer. atd the same time, i had worked

for many years for bill riker when he was the senator for washington. i would go back and forth working for him to going off and 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 out i at 30 years of age was out of work and i didn't really know what to do. so i moved to springfield and had an apartment on the main street up above a liquor store. ambulances would go by all the time. i would look out and wonder what those guys are doing. i saw an ad in the paper to be an emt and thought maybe i will try that. so i became an emt and then nriker decided to run for governor, so i worked for him and wrote speeches for him. but i still worked at night in

ems and became a paramedic. so when he left office in 1995, he had ag big party and we were all standing around and talking about what we were going to do. i stood up and said i'm going to become a paramedic. if i can't help people with my words anymore, i will try to help them with my hands. so i found my true calling there. i've been a paramedic in hartford ever since. as a benefit to being a writer, it gave me interesting things to write about. and this book just sort of afterwhile -- i carried a laptop with me in the ambulance, so that in between calls, i would write about the calls to try to understand them. and i would gain so many amazing stories of the people that i met, that the book just sort of came together rather easily. >> yeah,ou absolutely. and it sounds like your words

are still helping people today. hopefully this book will continue to aid in breaking down stigmas around opioid use and addiction and the disease addiction is as people read it. so, tell me a little bit about the last page -- i think it's the last page -- one of the last pages of the book. it's of the heroin in hartford. can you talk a little bit about that page and the books? >> so, the heroin of hartford, many of them have the dealer's brand on them. the dealer puts out a particular brand, and then he will try to type that and people will learn that it is a strong brand and they will try to deal it that way. i was fascinated by the

different names they come up with. it could have a truth in advertising. there's a name of a brand of heroin out there and people are not kidding about the brands they put on it. i dodo have a chapter about howi got upset some of the brands they were using like kermit the frog, bugs bunny, ms. kitty, i was upset with her that because kids would walk into the park and you would see bags all over the ground in hartford. we would play a game sometimes with my partner that anyplace the ambulance stops withinfe 50 feet of the ambulance, there's a heroin bag on the ground. if a kid picks up a bag that has kermit the frog and looks in and sees powdered sugar, there could be a whole new outcome to that. pbut for the most part, the brands that are out there today tend to be more skeletons as

opposed to the kid stuff. >> absolutely. such a great point about the dangers of advertising or pills that look a certain way that could be attractive to children. i mean,, not just pharmaceutical over-the-counter or prescription pills, i but in any drugs. 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 there's a section of the book where i go over my sort of plan. you have to and the criminal prosecution on the war on drugs. we spend so much money on the criminal side. wein have to stop treating peope

that use drugs as criminals and treat them as medical patients. we have to expunge the anti-stigma campaigns. the stigma alone, as i mentioned, there's a guy who volunteered after 9/11. despite all he had done for his country, he believed his country thought he was a scumbag because now he was a drug user. the stigma and the law drive people into the shadows where they use alone and die. i'mm very much a supporter of te safe injection sites. there are safeeg injection sites that are legal in the united states [inaudible] there are places and there's one in hartfordo where people can go. they go in and there is a doctor and they can use in that bathroom. the difference between that bathroom and a bathroom down the street at the subway or the mcdonald's where we find people dead is because they've been in

there too long. this bathroom after three minutes, somebody knocks on the door and says how are you doing in there, friend? and if there is an overdose, they are there. a safe injection site, you can have people using under the eyes ofof the health professional ant can talk to them about getting help and can be there to help mentor them. a lot of the people working on reduction have great success stories themselves. they are people who overcame addiction. so, i do absolutely support harn reduction. [inaudible] criminal prosecution for the war on drugs is very expensive and worse off now than when it started. >> yeah. now my final question for you is about the changes in the brain scans that you showed during your powerpoint. in your research, did you find

that those were irreversible changes or -- >> they are not -- everybody is different. there areeo some people who are damaged beyond repair, but there are scans that can show overtime brains do have the ability to recover. if i had longer time, i have a bunch of slides cut that i normally show when i talk about things. 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. what we want to try to do is keep them alive and not just pass them on. so, it's a hard thing. but again, we have to treat everybody as family 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 l any last words that u 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 probably almost 20 years now. it can be found at medics drive.com and also just plain mediscribe.com sometimes you go and nothing is there. but i write regularly about the opioid epidemic and other issues that i write about. covid and what we are seeing out there. i am on twitter. i just joined twitter for the eafirst time a few months ago, still learning the ins and outs but i am on @mediscribe and my book can be purchased through the bookstore here.

i really hope that you read it or tell people about it, and i hope if you read the stories thatd you are impacted by them n the same way that i was. >> absolutely. thank you so much. to the audienceif if you haven't already purchased a copy of "killing season," i'm dropping the link one more time or you can stop in and buy a copy forha yourself. thank you for joining us and talking about your incredibly moving book. and for sharing some of the things that you've learned along your journey of education and the tools and harm reduction is just one quick thing. amy is asking if you are on instagram. >> yes, i am. i'm trying to think. i think @mediscribe might be my thing here. i am on their.

sorry, i'm a little old -- @medicscribe. >> perfect. it sounds like your handles are consistent across the board, which is great. wonderful. well, to the audience, thank you so much for joining us this evening. and again, peter, thank you so much for joining. >> thank you for inviting me. i appreciate the chance to talk about the subject. >> john grisham discussed his work with the innocence project and in helping those wrongfully convicted. here's a portion of the program. >> once i realized that there were so many innocent people in prison, it's become 15 years later, 17 years later, something i still am fascinated by. as a storyteller because every wrongful conviction is a fantastic story because of the suffering, the injustices, the

waste. i've written some of those in smaller versions. and as a lawyer, i was deeply troubled because almost all of them could be, could have been prevented and we could prevent most of them today if we had the will to do so. but there are thousands of them. we had over 2,000 and the last 25 years. and that's the tip of the iceberg. >> you can watch the rest of this conversation and find all of john grisham's book tv appearances by searching for him on the website, booktv.org. welcome to the 18th and alice book festival. special thanks for hosting the festival and anonymous donors for helping underwrite to this. a couple of reminders. first of