Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived.
The 43-year-old was surrounded by police who arrested him after responding to a trespassing call in a Wisconsin parking lot. Officers had shocked him with a Taser and pinned him as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. Now he sat on the ground with hands cuffed behind his back and took in oxygen through a mask.
Then, officers moved Jackson to his side so a medic could inject him with a potent knockout drug.
“It’s just going to calm you down,” an officer assured Jackson. Within minutes, Jackson’s heart stopped. He never regained consciousness and died two weeks later.
I’ve been a paramedic for fourteen years. I’ve used chemical sedation before, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used it, and it was always for people that posed an imminent danger to both us and themselves and couldn’t be successfully controlled otherwise. What’s more is that medical control was always (rightly) super spooked about it and would order shit like 4mg of versed for a 300 lb dude who is still managing to move with three grown ass firemen holding him down (for those not in the know, I might as well have blown a raspberry in the guy’s ear for all the good that did). BUT they were right to be scared, because airway management is a high-stakes thing under the best conditions, but then you add trying to do it in the back of a moving van with limited space and no means of pharmaceutically reversing the benzo? Yeah, that’s a bad day.
Never once did we sedate someone ‘for’ the cops, though; it was only ever that the police needed us to once-over them before they go off to jail or the ER, or they were 100% a medical patient and the cops were helping us to keep from getting our asses beat by someone not in their right mind until we could get them under control. It seems like this pattern of sedating people for the cops really only took off in the last four or five years, and sort of seems to coincide with the proliferation of Ketamine as a more common ALS ambulance medication, IMO.
My buddy was an EMT for about a decade, and point blank told me that his training included when and how to tell cops no. It wasn’t a hard training course like something in a textbook, but it was a soft training course from all of the more experienced EMTs who he shadowed. And as he got more experience and began having new EMTs shadow him, he began to see why it was so important to teach. Every single one of them had stories about times they had to protect their patients from the cops by hiding them inside the ambulance, and times that the cops wanted them to do blatantly illegal and dangerous things to their patients.
Again, it wasn’t a hard written lesson, but every EMT he shadowed had an entire “hey uhh this is an uncomfortable conversation, but we’re heading to a scene where cops are already pissed. We may need to get between them and a patient” monologue. And every single one of them was completely stone-faced when giving said monologue. EMTs have some dark humor to cope with the shit they see, but that really wasn’t present here. It was always a very serious “just so you know, your duty is to the patient; Not to the police.”
That’s totally a fair point and I would love to think that all medics are awesome like you. What I don’t like is having the cops even remotely involved in the decision and not being held just as accountable as the medics. Ultimately it’s the medic’s butt and licence on the line while the cops just laugh at getting away with murder.
RN here. Maybe actually try blowing a raspberry in their ear next time and report back with the results. It might throw them off their game just long enough to get proper restraints on them.
Versed, doesn’t that make you forget things, my ex-wife used to work in a surgery center and she said when patients wake up in the middle of surgery they would get an extra dose of versed and never remember it happened.
Yeah, it can be and often is used to induce retrograde amnesia, where you don’t remember what happened while under the effects of the drug. In EMS, it’s mostly used for stopping seizures, though it’s also used for the sedative qualities.
Even ketamine as I understand it, requires monitoring of blood pressure. I have a friend with a heart condition and he was unable to undergo ketamine therapy. Ketamine is sadly becoming just a very profitable wellness drug business.