As posted a few days ago, I am pleased to announce Johns Hopkins University Press will be publishing my newest book, Killing Season A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic. The book will be released in April 2021, but is available for preorder now on Amazon.
The book tells the story of how I went from a new medic 25 years ago who believed that heroin users had major character flaws and that telling them to just say no or they will end up dead or in jail was the solution to the problem, to a proponent of harm reduction, which recognizes that addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease and whose victims deserve our compassion and not our scorn. In the book I share the stories that users have told me after I have resuscitated them, stories that show how they were all normal like the rest of us until fate, usually an injury or illness sent them down a difficult path they couldn't have imagined and which many were powerless to stop.
Topics include Stigma, the History of the Opioid Epidemic. The Science of Addiction, Naloxone, Fentanyl, Provider Safety, Harm Reduction, Safe Injection Sites, the War on Drugs, Pain Management and much more.
The book is a mixture of calls I have done, intermixed with a discussion of addiction and public policy issues. There are footnotes, but the book I believe reads easily, and is full of EMS scenes.
I am grateful to the editors (Robin Coleman) at Johns Hopkins for choosing to publish the book and to my agent, Jane Dystel for championing the project.
I am also thankful to all the readers of this blog who have supported and encouraged my posting about the opioid epidemic.
