STORY: "When Someone You Love Dies in Police Custody and They Blame “Excited Delirium,” by Tana Ganeva, published by 'The Influence' on May 5, 2016. (The Influence is a journalistic publication
covering the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs and
potentially addictive behaviors. We explore the nature of addiction and
the various responses to it, as well as political, scientific and
cultural aspects of our field. We aim neither to promote nor to demonize
drugs, and we approach our subject open-mindedly, with respect for
different lifestyles....Will Godfrey has previously served as editor-in-chief of The Fix and Substance.com, two innovative web publications covering similar subjects to The Influence. Prior to that he co-founded and edited Voice of the Ville, an award-winning magazine written and read by prisoners in London. Tana Ganeva is the deputy editor of The Influence.)
GIST: "Excited delirium is a very strange thing. Coined in the mid-1980s by a Miami medical examiner named Charles Wetli to explain deaths that seemed linked to cocaine use (but not overdose), it reportedly makes sufferers erupt in bizarre, aggressive behavior that may end in sudden death. Wetli thought excited delirium mostly afflicted young men with outsize coke habits, but he also proposed some highly dubious risk factors for women: a history of cocaine use and too much sex. When the dead bodies of sex workers began turning up around Miami throughout the 1980s, baffling detectives, who could find no signs of struggle or clear cause of death, Dr. Wetli surmised that after years of crack use, just one sex act was enough to kill them off. The women, it turned out, had in fact been asphyxiated, most likely by a serial killer. “You’re talking about little girls on the street, and it’s not too hard to asphyxiate them, especially when you have their backs on the ground and your weight on their abdomen,” a pathology professor told the Los Angeles Times. Ever since, there’s been disagreement about what excited delirium is and what causes it—and whether it exists. Yet it’s found its way into police training: Cops are widely taught that people in a state of excited delirium are out of their minds, have “superhuman strength,” and are “impervious to pain.” It’s “the difference between a Tyrannosaurus and a tabby cat. There’s no subtlety about the intensity of energy, the physicality. It doesn’t seem like you’re dealing with anything human,” expert William Everett is quoted saying in the Idaho Peace Officer Standards & Training lesson plan. And medical examiners cite excited delirium as cause of death, even though it’s not recognized by the American Medical Association or the DSM (the American College of Emergency Physicians does recognize it as a distinct medical condition). Civil liberties advocates are highly skeptical of the idea that otherwise healthy people just drop dead in police custody for reasons that have nothing to do with the police. “There have been more empirically based reasons why someone might have expired that aren’t investigated once excited delirium is raised,” says Eric Balaban, senior staff counsel at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “In instances where it’s been raised initially, once more inquiry has been done, they’ve often changed the cause of death.” Set against that are the cops who say they’ve witnessed it."
The entire story can be found at:
GIST: "Excited delirium is a very strange thing. Coined in the mid-1980s by a Miami medical examiner named Charles Wetli to explain deaths that seemed linked to cocaine use (but not overdose), it reportedly makes sufferers erupt in bizarre, aggressive behavior that may end in sudden death. Wetli thought excited delirium mostly afflicted young men with outsize coke habits, but he also proposed some highly dubious risk factors for women: a history of cocaine use and too much sex. When the dead bodies of sex workers began turning up around Miami throughout the 1980s, baffling detectives, who could find no signs of struggle or clear cause of death, Dr. Wetli surmised that after years of crack use, just one sex act was enough to kill them off. The women, it turned out, had in fact been asphyxiated, most likely by a serial killer. “You’re talking about little girls on the street, and it’s not too hard to asphyxiate them, especially when you have their backs on the ground and your weight on their abdomen,” a pathology professor told the Los Angeles Times. Ever since, there’s been disagreement about what excited delirium is and what causes it—and whether it exists. Yet it’s found its way into police training: Cops are widely taught that people in a state of excited delirium are out of their minds, have “superhuman strength,” and are “impervious to pain.” It’s “the difference between a Tyrannosaurus and a tabby cat. There’s no subtlety about the intensity of energy, the physicality. It doesn’t seem like you’re dealing with anything human,” expert William Everett is quoted saying in the Idaho Peace Officer Standards & Training lesson plan. And medical examiners cite excited delirium as cause of death, even though it’s not recognized by the American Medical Association or the DSM (the American College of Emergency Physicians does recognize it as a distinct medical condition). Civil liberties advocates are highly skeptical of the idea that otherwise healthy people just drop dead in police custody for reasons that have nothing to do with the police. “There have been more empirically based reasons why someone might have expired that aren’t investigated once excited delirium is raised,” says Eric Balaban, senior staff counsel at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “In instances where it’s been raised initially, once more inquiry has been done, they’ve often changed the cause of death.” Set against that are the cops who say they’ve witnessed it."
The entire story can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com;
Harold Levy; Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
