In the Looney tunes cartoon, Ralf E. Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog go to work each morning, exchanging greetings while punching the clock. “Morning, Ralph,” the dog says. “Morning, Sam,” the wolf replies. Then it is down to business. The wolf spends his hours trying to steal the sheep and the sheepdog spends his hours […]

It hasn’t come to Hartford yet, but EMS in states such as Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Florida have encountered patients who have overdosed on heroin laced with Carfentanil, an opiate of the synthetic fentanyl family that is 10,000 times stronger than morphine and usually used to tranquilize elephants.  Carfentanil is basically a chemical weapon […]

The early returns are in. Heroin addicts in the greater Hartford area have cast two votes for Donald Trump (Using empty heroin bags I found in an area commuter lot as a proxy). Questions.  Did the dealer stamp half his bags with Donald Trump and the other half with Hillary Clinton in order to provide […]

Last year we heard about a CPR app that alerted people who knew CPR to nearby cardiac arrests so they could race to the scene and perform bystander CPR, potentially saving precious minutes that could mean the difference between life and death, or between anoxic brain injury and the life of a taxpayer. This week […]

I have been writing much lately about heroin with the backdrop of Hartford’s Park Street which is one of many epicenters of the current heroin epidemic.  Today, I am going to briefly change the backgrounds.  Instead of Park Street with its back drop of bakeries, bodegas, Spanish restaurants,  and young tattooed men, with crooked baseball […]

I mentioned that we had a patient this week who said she stayed away from the white powdered heroin because of her fear of Fentanyl.  Powdered Fentanyl is white and very hard to distinguish visually from white powdered heroin. A number of years ago drug dealers started enhancing their heroin with Fentanyl.  Fentanyl is stronger […]

Paramedics in North Carolina and in Cleveland, Ohio are providing Narcan kits to high risk patients in their communities. Cleveland EMS Providers to Distribute Overdose Kits N.C. County Allows Paramedics to Provide Precautionary Narcan Kits My partner and I often spend time on heroin overdose calls educating the patient’s family, friends or bystanders/social circle on […]

On January 1, 2017, Connecticut will launch their first set of statewide EMS protocols.  They are largely modeled after those in New Hampshire.  Paramedics and EMTs will be expected to know all the protocols even though their local sponsor hospital may not approve all the drugs and treatment modalities listed.  Any service wanting to do […]

I only went to one heroin overdose this week and one PCP overdose.  The heroin overdose was on Park Street in the South end and the PCP was on Capen in the north end.  You get get called for an overdose on Park Street and it is pretty much always heroin.  You get called for […]

Last week I speculated that despite increased access to Narcan, the opiate epidemic would continue to rage with deaths in 2016 exceeding those of 2015. Narcan Thoughts Sadly, this was borne out in just released data from the state medical examiner. Through the first six months of 2016, 444 people died of fatal overdoses in […]