Conn. Medic`s Powerful New Book Tackles Opioid Epidemic

Hartford Courant

A veteran Hartford paramedic and published author laces his new book with grim and sorrowful scenes from Connecticut’s worsening opioid epidemic: A heroin user tumbles unconscious from a portable toilet; a young woman, already wizened and pocked with sores, sells herself to feed a daily need; a mother kneels over her dead son, “kissing his face, her tears falling on his cold skin,” pleading in Spanish, “‘No te vayas; no te vayas (Do not go; do not go).’”

Killing Season: A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic, by Peter Canning, is due out on April 6 from Johns Hopkins University Press. Canning, 62, has been a frontline medic since 1995, an eyewitness to the misery of heroin-obsessed lives in Hartford and its suburbs.

A former speechwriter for then-U.S. Sen. and Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker, he has written several books (petercanning.org), both nonfiction and fiction, centered on life-and-death experiences that have become much more frequent in the past few years. State authorities say fatal overdoses in Connecticut increased by 13% last year, and there’s no sign the trend is cooling.

A Simsbury native and married father of three children, Canning now works part time for American Medical Response and as EMS coordinator at John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington. He recently answered questions about his new book, his advocacy for chronic drug users and lessons learned from a life of emergency response.window.dicnf = {};(function(){/* Copyright The Closure Library Authors. 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