Ketamine is still being used hundreds of times a year by paramedics across the state.
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The frustration spikes after an emergency medical team from West Metro Fire Rescue arrives on the scene. A paramedic’s rote questions about whether he is on drugs and his grasp on reality draws an emphatic response. “Talk to me like a real person,” Axtell insists. “Goddamn it, you’re not even listening to me.”
On the video, Springsteen can be heard expressing astonishment that Axtell was being sedated. Looking back on the situation now, she expresses regret that she didn’t protest more vigorously — but she also didn’t want to be accused of using her position as an elected city official to interfere. “I thought they were taking him to a squad car,” she says. “But they had normalized this so much in their minds.
The fallout of the McClain case extended well beyond those involved in the fatal encounter. In 2021, new state legislation set tough restrictions on the use of ketamine outside of a hospital setting, prohibited police officers from influencing paramedics to sedate a suspect, and declared that the controversial “diagnosis” of excited delirium couldn’t be used to justify ketamine use.
How ketamine became the wonder drug for emergency medical services is a bit more complicated. As far back as the early 2000s, first responders began grappling with an increasing number of calls involving agitated and possibly psychotic individuals, fueled by some combination of street drugs — meth, cocaine, opioids — and mental illness. A few prominent agencies began looking into their pharmaceutical cornucopia for answers.
• In 2018, deputies and paramedics in Colorado Springs responded to a trespassing report and found Jerica LaCour, 29, curled in a fetal position and weeping in a parking lot.on scene, paramedic Jason Poulson injected the mother of five with ketamine. She died minutes later; an autopsy report attributed the death to “respiratory arrest associated with acute alcohol and ketamine intoxication.”
Springsteen filed a complaint with CDPHE about the paramedics’ actions in Axtell’s case. She received a letter stating that the department had investigated the matter thoroughly, including “interviews and meetings with persons with knowledge of the event in question,” and determined there were no grounds for disciplinary sanctions. But that investigation didn’t involve talking to Springsteen, an eyewitness, or viewing her video, which contradicts the paramedic’s account of the incident.
Scott Sholes, the EMS chief of the Durango Fire Protection District and vice president of the Emergency Medical Services Association of Colorado, says that one of the new law’s biggest impacts was on “how we interact with our partners in law enforcement.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, he adds, as it compelled paramedics to re-examine their roles and responsibilities on scene.
Yet ketamine is still in the tool box, to some extent. According to reports compiled by the CDPHE, ketamine was administered by EMS agencies across the state 1,703 times during the latter half of 2022 and the first half of 2023, a nearly 15 percent increase over the previous year.
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