Paramedics' role in driving change in addictions support

Killing Season was written by Peter Canning and published in 2021 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Peter is a paramedic in Hartford, Connecticut, USA with 25 years of experience under him. When he began his career, he saw people who had overdosed on drugs as only victims of their own character flaws; ‘he took care of them (in the back of the ambulance) but didn't care for them’. This book documents Peter's journey as a frontline paramedic in a city besieged with opioid overdoses, with overdose numbers and deaths rising daily.

In the book, as we ride along with Peter in the ambulance, he introduces us to several characters with opioid dependence. Peter describes how the 911 calls come in and we become very familiar with locations in the book that are frequent hot spots for drug use in the city of Hartford. As overdose numbers are increasing, and Peter is seeing some of the same familiar faces overdosing, he starts looking at the epidemic with a different mindset. Instead of dismissing drug users as ‘junkies’, he asks them about their history and how they ended up in the back of the ambulance after being resuscitated by paramedics and fire crews. In this book, we see the human behind the overdose, the somebody's somebody.