An investigation led by The Associated Press has found that the practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years.
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.“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.
Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.
Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.
Emergency medical workers,"if they aren’t careful, can simply become an extension of the police’s handcuffs, of their weapons, of their nightsticks,” said Claire Zagorski, a paramedic and an addiction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re running around on the streets administering these heavy-duty medications that could be lethal,” said Honey Gutzalenko, a nurse whose husband died after he was injected with midazolam in 2021 while restrained by police near San Francisco. “It’s just not right.”Jackson was standing on a truck outside a radio station on the border of the small Wisconsin cities of Eau Claire and Altoona. An employee called 911 before dawn on Oct.
Police identified him through his tattoos, learning he was on probation for meth possession. They noticed the truck had minor damage and decided to arrest him. The Eau Claire Fire Department’s excited delirium protocol advises, “Rapid sedation is the key to de-escalation!!!!!” The medic measured 400 milligrams after estimating the 6-foot-tall Jackson weighed 175 pounds, enough to immobilize someone within minutes. He injected the medicine into Jackson’s buttocks.
Jackson’s mother, Rita Gowens, collapsed while shopping at an Indiana Walmart when she learned her oldest son was hospitalized and not expected to survive. The man was in danger of falling into traffic below when officers reached through the fence and grabbed him. In time, its use became standard from Las Vegas to Columbus, Ohio, to Palm Beach County, Florida. The earliest death involving ketamine documented in AP’s investigation came in 2015, when 34-year-old Juan Carrizales was injected after struggling with police in the Dallas suburb of Garland, Texas.
Facing criticism, Hennepin Healthcare halted a study examining the effectiveness of ketamine on agitated patients. The Food and Drug Administration later found the research failed to protect vulnerable, intoxicated people who had not given consent.By 2021, the American College of Emergency Physicians warned ketamine impacted breathing and the heart more than previously believed.“Ketamine is not as benign as we might have hoped it to be,” a co-author of the new position, Dr.
The women’s deaths eventually were attributed to a serial killer. Wetli’s theory survived. And over time, symptoms described by Wetli and others — “superhuman strength,” animal-like noises and high pain tolerance — became disproportionately assigned to Black people. The terms spread to police and emergency medical services to describe certain agitated people — and explain sudden deaths.
In 2008, the biggest names in excited delirium research gathered at a Las Vegas hotel for a three-day meeting organized by a group with ties to Taser’s manufacturer.“ The panel’s 2009 paper disclosed none of these relationships. It found excited delirium was real, could result in death regardless of whether someone was shocked with a Taser and called for “aggressive chemical sedation” to treat the symptoms.
DeBard said the symptoms were based on medical observations, not race. “If you’ve got somebody that’s delirious, irrational, aggressive, hyperactive, running around naked, I mean, it’s really pretty easy" to recognize, he said. Officers are told not to dictate medical treatment but “some knuckleheads” have done otherwise, said Peters, whose group hosted the 2008 Las Vegas meeting that focused on excited delirium.
His wife said Gutzalenko, a former critical care nurse, would never have consented to receive midazolam that day.“I know from being a registered nurse since 2004, you don’t administer a sedative to someone who is clearly already in respiratory distress,” she said, adding that his death has been devastating to their two teenage children.
Sedatives can dull the instinct to compensate by breathing quickly and heavily to blow off carbon dioxide, essential for the heart to beat, said Dr. Christopher Stephens, a UTHealth Houston anesthesiologist and former paramedic. “Guess who gets ketamine?” paramedic Jason Poulson of AMR, the nation’s largest ambulance company, said as LaCour was restrained on a gurney, according to body-camera footage.
Dr. Victor Weedn said the level of meth in Jackson’s blood was high but generally not lethal. He said Jackson likely died from high blood acid levels, with police restraint and possibly ketamine contributing.The autopsy was performed in Ramsey County, Minnesota. A county spokesperson defended the findings from a now-retired medical examiner, saying the discrepancy on the ketamine dose wasn’t significant.
He said sedatives rarely cause deaths by themselves but additional studies could look at whether they play a role in fatal police struggles where many factors are involved.Even when autopsies implicated sedatives, investigations didn’t always follow. When deaths were investigated, inquiries usually focused on whether police used excessive force. In audio and video reviewed by AP, investigators seemed uninterested in how sedation may have contributed.
American College Of Emergency Physicians Dr. Charles Wetli A Miami Forensic Pathologist Dr. Joye Carter Elijah Mcclain George Floyd Hennepin Healthcare Jackson’S Mother Rita Gowens Jeremy Cooper Ohio State University Professor Dr. Mark Debard
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