Colorado’s law enforcement officers will no longer recognize “excited delirium” after a state regulatory board voted to strike the controversial diagnosis on Friday from all training documents starting in January.
The move, which was passed at the state Peace Officers Standards and Training board meeting unanimously and without debate, comes as two Aurora paramedics face felony charges for giving Elijah McClain, an unarmed, innocent Black man, an overdose of ketamine, in part, because they believed he was suffering from the condition.
Ketamine doesn’t carry the risk of respiratory depression and hypotension that other sedatives and pain killers do. No risk that you might have to immediately intubate someone.
Haloperidol is less risky still in terms of respiratory influence, though ketamine is faster acting.
But this doesn’t really add anything, nor does it answer my question about why they didn’t go with established medical procedure in this case that ended with the unnecessary death of a person, in no small part due to that break with procedure.
Sorry I was only addressing the reasoning behind paramedics being allowed to administer ketamine in the field and not other drugs. And reviewing this case, I don’t see any indication for haloperidol either. They should not have drugged this person at all:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Elijah_McClain
But we should have teams of psychiatric professionals who are qualified to administer things like haloperidol responding to emergency calls that are specifically stated to be for psychiatric crises. I don’t really want random paramedics in charge of choosing when to administer haloperidol, which can have significant and permanent side effects even after one dose.