Police and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) deal with a lot of people in crisis – including various medical crises, exacerbated or caused by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, or physical pathologies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Combining the stress of a contact with police, the medical episode and other contributing factors can cause all sorts of problems, some of them potentially fatal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A standard method of dealing with Excited Delirium and Positional Asphyxia, while detaining and maintaining physical control over someone<\/em>, is to turn them on their side. It’s easy enough, relatively, to maintain physical control – but their chest can expand, their diaphragm can expand and contract the lungs which, with someone in crisis, helps bring down the blood acids that lead to Acidosis, lowering the risk of cardiac arrest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Or at least, that was what the Minneapolis Police Department was taught by Hennepin EMS<\/a>, the paramedic service for Hennepin County, which helped train Minneapolis cops in basic first aid and other medical techniques used to stabilize people in crisis, even when they needed to be detained an controlled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And for cases where more intervention is needed, some paramedics use a drug called ketamine<\/a>. it’s a sedative, used in operating rooms for starting general anaesthesia – but it works just fine for sedating someone in a crisis, letting them breathe and recover while de-stressing, physically as well as mentally. Hennepin EMS was the first paramedic agency in the country to use Ketamin to sedate people in medical emergencied, along with about a third of all EMS agencies in the US. It’s a “very safe drug that works quicker [in his experience] than anything else”, says my source. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But – says my source – the article, the inevitable raft of subsequent lawsuits and regulatory investigations resulted, in my source’s words, in some EMS medics “…being spooked. As an agency, we were less likely to administer optimal treatments.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s also a component in some “date rape” drugs – which we’ll come back to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hennepin EMS trained Minneapolis cops – and used Ketamine to de-escalate medical crises. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That is, until just about two years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s when a story came out in the Star Tribune, by Andy Mannix, entitled “At urging of Minneapolis police, Hennepin EMS workers subdued dozens with a powerful sedative<\/a>“. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A source formerly located in Hennepin EMS, speaking on condition of anonymity, tells me the Mannix article got pretty much every substantive fact about the use of Ketamine wrong (“He spelled Hennepin right”, my source quipped). <\/p>\n\n\n\n But the damage was…well, not done. It began. Minneapolis broke its training arrangement with Hennepin EMS, and stopped the use of ketamine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n