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Comment by nerdbaggy | Hacker News Reader

There are some good uses cases . You arrive on scene and the patient is injured and agitated and lashing out. EMT is having a hard time as well. You need to give them something. Basically Benzos or Ketamine, and Ketamine is much safer and can relieve pain

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Yes, but drugs should only be administered by suitably trained and educated professionals such as EMT and health care professionals. Not police!

Paramedics were the ones who killed Elijah McClain with ketamine.

Putting aside that police shouldn’t be utilizing drugs period, there is zero justification for administering drugs to someone who isn’t a danger to themselves or others, as was the case for McClain. It makes more sense when you realize that the Aurora PD is eighth in the nation for police killings per capita.

My fiancée has to deal with kids in the ER who got injected with too much ketamine by overzealous EMTs all the time. I don’t think limiting it to EMTs will solve the problem.

Someone with a minimum amount of training and who makes something close to minimum wage making these kinds of decisions is scary.

Many (not all) police departments cross-train police officers as EMTs. The two are not mutually exclusive and, in many ways, complement each other.

Full time EMTs aren’t trained enough to make good decisions about when it’s appropriate to administer ketamine and how much to give. A cop who did some EMT training but doesn’t use the skills full time is going to be even worse.

I am very much against the idea of police using ketamine, but I believe all street officers should be fully trained EMT's as well.

It wasn't the police who gave the med. It was paramedics.

I always had the impression that emergency departments used haloperidol or chlorpromazine because they don't cause increased intracranial pressure like ketamine nor respiratory depression like benzodiazepines. I'm sure it varies for individual experience.

If a suspect is restrained enough to be injected with a needle, then the police have already overpowered them. If an EMT has not judged that a sedative will medically help their patient, the right answer for the police is hand and ankle cuffs. Ordering administration of a sedative is purely for the officers' own desires - to make their jobs easier in the future and to extra-judicially punish.

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