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SPEAKER_12: Crack cocaine plagued the United States for more than a decade. This week on Notes from America author Donovan Ramsey explains how the myths of crack prolonged a disastrous era and shaped millions of lives. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_16: Before we start the following story contains a moment or two that's pretty intense and may not be suitable for young kids.
SPEAKER_16: So Peter, Matt, where do you want to launch into this?
SPEAKER_15: It's a call from dispatch to the Bath County EMS station. These are the people that are
SPEAKER_09: dispatched to medical emergencies. Last night, remember, it's like one or two o'clock in the afternoon, something like that.
SPEAKER_13: Tones went off for a unresponsive male.
SPEAKER_08: All right, so that's Scotty Whiteman.
SPEAKER_15: Yep.
SPEAKER_08: Other voices, Jay Faux. We're partners in EMS service in Bath County, Kentucky.
SPEAKER_15: Anyway, call comes in. First one of the day. Scotty and Jay hop in their ambulance and they rush over to this apartment complex. They'd been there before. It's this sort of squat, two story building. Like a strip mall almost.
SPEAKER_08: When we get there, jump out, put the gloves on, enter this small apartment.
SPEAKER_09: And immediately when they come in off to the left is the living room.
SPEAKER_15: Law enforcement was there.
SPEAKER_08: The chief of police was there talking to the two people that were alert in the house, a woman and a guy.
SPEAKER_15: Who are sitting on a couch. And then if you look immediately to the right, it's just like the kitchen is there.
SPEAKER_15: And that's where Scotty and Jay see. Lying on his back, his arms to his side.
SPEAKER_13: A guy in his mid-fifties.
SPEAKER_08: Completely unresponsive. He was laying in water about three inches deep where I guess somebody in the house had
SPEAKER_13: taken the sprayer from the kitchen sink and had sprayed him down. Trying to revive the guy. Bring him back to life. And it doesn't happen that way.
SPEAKER_15: So Jane Scottie entered the kitchen, stand over this guy. He hadn't started turning blue yet.
SPEAKER_08: So I checked and make sure he was breathing. And he was. But barely.
SPEAKER_09: Making these really low, shallow breaths.
SPEAKER_08: And then I pulled his eyelids back and checked his pupils. They're tiny. Pinpoints. He was overdosed. Pretty indicative of opiates. So I said, okay.
SPEAKER_09: So Jay grabs his medic kit. He goes into his bag and he pulls out this nasal spray. It's a drug called naloxone.
SPEAKER_15: It's also commonly referred to as Narcan. And it's a drug that's known as being this Lazarus drug. Yeah, because it immediately throws an opioid overdose into reverse.
SPEAKER_09: And like brings people back from the brink of death.
SPEAKER_15: So Jay crouches over this guy and he takes this nasal spray, sticks it up one of the guy's nostrils, sprays it, takes it out.
SPEAKER_09: Waits a beat. Does the same thing to the other nostril. Back awake.
SPEAKER_15: Within seconds. The guy opened his eyes. Talked, what's going on?
SPEAKER_13: I grab a towel and start drying him off.
SPEAKER_08: And then I pushed him up so I could sit him up. Got him up. Got him onto the stretcher.
SPEAKER_13: Loaded in the truck. And then I take off to St. Clair hospital.
SPEAKER_09: Scotty's up front. He's driving the ambulance.
SPEAKER_15: Jay's in the back with the patient. Everything was good with him. Everything was routine. When all of a sudden.
SPEAKER_08: Scotty hollered through the window. He yelled at me. I don't feel right.
SPEAKER_13: I can remember a weird taste coming into my mouth and a real odd smell hitting my nose. What are your tastes? I can't describe it. It was just, it was like chewing on steel.
SPEAKER_15: Scotty while he's driving, he gets on the radio.
SPEAKER_13: Hollering at the next county over. Saying, hey I need help.
SPEAKER_04: I've got a light feeling. Increased temperature. I need you to send me an ambulance.
SPEAKER_04: On the eastbound exit ramp of the 137. Just have them meet us there please.
SPEAKER_13: Can for. Made it to the bottom of the ramp. Put the truck in park. Jay jumped out of the back and ran up to the front.
SPEAKER_08: Went to the passenger side. Got Scotty. He was already slumped over. Unresponsive. It was that quick.
SPEAKER_15: Like he was out cold.
SPEAKER_16: Not waking up anything? No, no, he's not responding at all.
SPEAKER_15: So what's happening? This is like, this is the thing that I don't know, was so shocking to me is that when Jay then checked out Scotty. He had pinpoint pupils, snoring respirations.
SPEAKER_15: He seemed to have the exact same symptoms as the patient in the back of the ambulance who had overdosed. Wait, what?
SPEAKER_16: The exact same symptoms? Yeah, that's what it looked like to Jay. How can, how does that even happen?
SPEAKER_15: So Jay explained it to us like, he says if you wind back, they had gone into this apartment to treat this guy who was on the kitchen floor. The guy was wet. And he said he believes that when they were helping him up. Scotty had rubbed against his skin to skin contact with his forearm.
SPEAKER_15: And Jay said he believes that what likely happened in that moment is that whatever drug this guy had taken had now gotten onto Scotty's arm, absorbed through his skin into his system, and then like 15 minutes later had caused Scotty to pass out. Wow.
SPEAKER_16: That's, that's really strange.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it seems like a really unusual thing to happen. But the thing is, like, I guess what's even weirder is that like, this wasn't the first time I had heard this story. Right, like Peter's been following this for a while.
SPEAKER_09: So yeah, I've been keeping a list of these types of incidents. And what I found is, this wasn't an isolated incident. These types of things are happening a lot.
SPEAKER_00: And now at six, EMTs in danger.
SPEAKER_09: There have been cases reported in North Carolina, Florida, where a police officer nearly died,
SPEAKER_03: rural Ohio, rural Pennsylvania, from an accidental drug overdose, West Virginia, three police
SPEAKER_03: officers in southeast Wisconsin, Texas, California rush to the hospital to EMT Massachusetts
SPEAKER_00: taken to the hospital at breaking news in Providence, Vermont, New Hampshire, police
SPEAKER_00: officers are hospitalized, Nebraska EMTs and an officer went to the hospital as a deputy
SPEAKER_09: went to the hospital overnight. The officer was responding to an overdose.
SPEAKER_09: There's been over 100 reported incidents all over the country. So I mean, I've been reporting on opioids for a number of years. And I guess as I was watching these kinds of incidents occur, it kind of felt like I was watching a contagion unfold in real time. I mean, I guess when I was reading all these stories, I was just thinking like, what is going on here? What's happening?
SPEAKER_06: I'm Chad Iboomrod.
SPEAKER_16: I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. And today we have a story about what happened that day in that apartment, in that ambulance in Kentucky. Definitely kind of a mystery story. But at its core, it's really a story about wanting to do good, choosing to do good, and
SPEAKER_03: then having to suddenly bear the cost of doing good.
SPEAKER_16: Okay. The story comes to us from Peter Smith, freelance journalist. And it also was co-reported by Peter, our producer Matt Kielty. Hey, everybody. Okay, so, so Kentucky.
SPEAKER_16: So we wanted to talk to Scotty and his partner, Jay, about what happened that day.
SPEAKER_15: And about what's been happening. So we flew into Lexington. We drove about an hour east. And it was some nice rolling bluegrass hills.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, a lot of green.
SPEAKER_15: And we drove to this tiny little city called Owingsville. And we're at the Bath County Emergency Medical Services. Where the Bath County EMS is. White building, linoleum siding, big garage doors like you'd see at an auto shop. Couple big white Bath County EMS ambulances. It's funny, there's a washer and dryer, ashtray on top of it. And attached to the garage is a one-story house, basically. So we essentially just showed up at this place to introduce ourselves and say, hey.
SPEAKER_09: Hey, how are you?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, go ahead. Thank you.
SPEAKER_15: How are you? There were a few people inside. Gary, the director of the station, was there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: And you're serving the whole county? Yeah, I think it's 284 square miles, I think, is how big our county is. You know about how many people that is? A little over 12,000 now, I believe. And we're covering that out of one station.
SPEAKER_15: Feels like there's beds in back?
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, beds in the back, yeah.
SPEAKER_15: You all end up just kind of like living here? Yeah, it's basically like an apartment.
SPEAKER_15: There's a kitchen. We were in the living room with Gary sitting on a couch. There's these big Lazy Boys, a ginormous TV. Billy Bob Thorne was on. He's a mean dude.
SPEAKER_11: In the show? No, he's just a mean dude in real life. Remember that? We went to a Willie Nelson concert and his band opened for Willie Nelson, and somebody in the audience heckled him. And he just about came off the stage after him, and he called him everything but a sewing machine and a milk cow. I mean, he made up cuss words. Yeah, he's a wiry little feller.
SPEAKER_15: So we were kind of just hanging around with Gary. It was probably like 15 minutes, and then...
SPEAKER_09: There's Scotty. Scotty walked in.
SPEAKER_11: That's Peter Smith. Nice to meet you.
SPEAKER_15: How you doing? I'm Matt. Guilty.
SPEAKER_16: How you guys doing? This is the EMT who overdosed. Yeah, Scotty's the guy that supposedly overdosed.
SPEAKER_15: He's in his 50s, white hair, tall. He's got bright blue eyes. I got a question.
SPEAKER_11: How did you even find out about all of this?
SPEAKER_13: I read it in the New York Times.
SPEAKER_09: There was one line in the story about three EMS personnel. I don't know if that's the truth to it. Pretty much, you know.
SPEAKER_11: Big death on the story. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: And so then I thought there was something unusual about that, and I was curious to hear the real story.
SPEAKER_13: Give me just a few minutes and... Yeah, yeah, yeah. No rush. There's no rush. We'll sit down and discuss things. All right.
SPEAKER_15: So eventually it was just the three of us in this living room. You want to set up the table or...
SPEAKER_13: I was thinking...
SPEAKER_09: I mean, maybe I should preface this by saying that you can't really understand this story unless you understand a little bit about what EMS personnel do. I talked to some other EMTs that told me that everybody has their why. Everybody has this thing they say. It's like, this is the reason I got into this line of business. I would say like a very small percentage don't have second or third jobs. They don't make a lot of money. So everybody has this why.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, maybe you can just tell...
SPEAKER_09: And so I asked Scotty what his why was, and he told me this story. And I think it's a really incredible story that not only explains why he does what he does, but it also explained like why he holds on to certain things. So in September of 1999, I was involved in an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
SPEAKER_09: So it was early in the morning. It was raining. Yeah, it was during Hurricane Floyd.
SPEAKER_13: He was out there for work? Cross-country trucking.
SPEAKER_15: What kind of a rig where you're driving?
SPEAKER_13: It was a freight liner and I was pulling a flatbed trailer with a load of pipe on it.
SPEAKER_15: So he's barreling down the Turnpike with this heavy load of steel on the back. And with the weather, like visibility starts to get bad.
SPEAKER_13: Slowed my speed way down, probably running approximately 50, 55 mile an hour.
SPEAKER_09: And he comes through this construction site.
SPEAKER_13: And something happened in the front end of the truck. Hear it pop. The front tire had blown out and I basically became a passenger at that point. There was no controlling it.
SPEAKER_09: His 18-wheeler was like careening out of control down the Turnpike and it is like skidding across the wet pavement.
SPEAKER_15: And the truck lunged to the right. There was a concrete wall there that had guardrail attached to it.
SPEAKER_13: It nosed into the guardrail.
SPEAKER_15: Came flying back across both lanes.
SPEAKER_13: Back toward the center divider and the truck hit it. Plowed through the center divider. And began to like roll over. And came down and struck a vehicle that was traveling the other direction.
SPEAKER_15: Scotty says he doesn't remember much of what happened next other than his truck finally coming to a stop. After that, the next thing I remember was standing on the frame of the truck watching
SPEAKER_13: diesel fuel run underneath of me. And I could hear the truck burning.
SPEAKER_09: Somehow he managed to get out of the cab and he's standing on this tail of the cab. And the truck is on fire. And while he's standing there, other people who are driving down the highway have stopped and they've started to yell at him. Screaming at me to get away from the truck.
SPEAKER_13: I got off the truck and I looked up the road and I saw the other vehicle. And I knew then that it wasn't good.
SPEAKER_22: What did it look like?
SPEAKER_13: It was a very destroyed vehicle.
SPEAKER_15: So what happens next?
SPEAKER_13: There was a lady had a minivan. I have no idea where she came from. She opened the side door on her minivan and had me sit in the floorboard until the ambulance got there. I remember looking down at my left hand and the back of my left hand, all the skin was probably hanging down 8 to 10, 12 inches where it had melted the skin. Like your skin's just dangling off your body?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. I remember when the ambulance getting there and there was a female paramedic. And when she walked up and looked at me, I remember her going, Oh my God. This ain't good, is it? And she said, no. She didn't lie to me. She said, no, it's not good.
SPEAKER_15: He got rushed to a hospital. In five broken ribs, massive skin burns.
SPEAKER_13: I do remember him telling me, you're going to lose your left hand. And I told him, I said, that's not an option. I'm left handed.
SPEAKER_15: Surgeons immediately started doing skin grafts.
SPEAKER_13: Took skin off my legs and put on my arms and my back. As you can see, I've still got my left hand. Still left handed? I'm still left handed.
SPEAKER_15: And when you said it was a couple of days after the accident when they told you about the other car, how did that conversation unfold?
SPEAKER_13: It was an attorney that was for the representing the trucking company that I was driving for was the one that actually told me about the fatalities that had been involved with the accident. So that was how I found out.
SPEAKER_15: You remember what exactly happened?
SPEAKER_13: I just remember him walking into the hospital room and he's like, hi, my name is yeah. And my name is so-and-so and I'm with, uh, I'm an attorney with representing the company that you drive for. And, uh, we don't know if you've been informed of this or not, but there was three fatalities involved and no, I hadn't been informed, but yes, I have been now when, when we started into court proceedings, that was when I found out names and, and where they were from. Uh, where were they from? They were from Connecticut. They had been on vacation in North Carolina, uh, the hurricane coming in, they were evacuated out of North Carolina. So they had decided that they were, uh, going to travel up into Pennsylvania and, uh, try to find a place to finish their vacation in Pennsylvania. And that's what puts them there. If I'd have traveled two miles an hour faster or two miles an hour slower, we wouldn't have been at the same place at the same time.
SPEAKER_15: Scotty eventually went back to long haul trucking, but he says that he kept thinking about that day, about that accident, the people who were killed. Never forgot. I still haven't forgotten. But the other thing that really struck him about that day was that everybody who showed up to that scene, the fire department, the EMS, everybody there was a volunteer.
SPEAKER_15: And that's something he couldn't really shake.
SPEAKER_13: That people volunteered to come to me and they didn't know who I was. They didn't care who I was. They didn't pass judgment on me that, yeah, I was in a horrific accident and I may have been the cause of that accident. They didn't care. They viewed me as someone that needed help. And that was all they viewed me as.
SPEAKER_15: And Scotty said the more he thought about it, the more he felt like he had this sort of debt to pay back for the lives that were lost that day. For the ones that he extinguished.
SPEAKER_09: And the way that he's going to do that is become a volunteer. He's going to become one of these people. To help those in need. That comes to your aid no matter what.
SPEAKER_13: And as they say, you know, the rest is history. Here I am. I'm an EMT. So we spent a few days with Scotty following him around on some of his runs.
SPEAKER_15: And as an EMT, his main responsibility is to drive the ambulance, but also to assist his partner. Hello. Hi.
SPEAKER_09: Who's often Jay.
SPEAKER_15: What's going on? And out in rural Kentucky, they get all sorts of calls. Hey!
SPEAKER_05: Here, honey. They just want to look at you. It's okay.
SPEAKER_08: You're okay. How long has he been acting like that, huh? 10 past nine.
SPEAKER_15: Okay. Like a three-year-old who was having trouble breathing. Just breathe.
SPEAKER_05: It's okay. Look, look. Look at my arm. It's okay. Mommy, go.
SPEAKER_09: I've got a lot of calls from nursing homes. Hey, friend.
SPEAKER_13: Is that hurt? Got him on six on main.
SPEAKER_15: Where a call can be for something that feels like so small, like a cough or low blood sugar. Ready, go. Affordable over to main.
SPEAKER_15: One night, at nine-twenty at night, I got a call. Older woman fell off the porch. They helped pick up an elderly woman.
SPEAKER_13: Oh, good job. Good job. Sometimes they just get called to give people their beds.
SPEAKER_09: You're going to feel a big poke, okay?
SPEAKER_08: Count of three. Here we go.
SPEAKER_15: One, two, three. Big poke. They get the innocuous calls. And then, of course, there are overdoses. By the way, I'm Matt.
SPEAKER_21: I'm Earl. Earl. Nice to meet you. Peter.
SPEAKER_15: I'm Earl. Because we were these out-of-town reporters, everybody kept saying that we should go down to the old jail.
SPEAKER_10: So you're the jailer? Yeah.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah. Which is where we met the county jailer, Earl. How's it going, sir? How you doing there, bud? I'm Matt and his friend Mitchell. Nice to meet you. How are you? I'm good. So Earl let us into the jail. It's abandoned now. Paint peeling off the walls. He walked us into this front room.
SPEAKER_21: Let's see. I like to ask him where they got them.
SPEAKER_15: It's full of weed whackers, lawn mowers.
SPEAKER_09: Earl oversees the work release program, so the people that are in jail are sort of on this temporary work release program. They do lawn maintenance along the highway. Oh, I'll sit down.
SPEAKER_21: Where they got them at, Mitchell? Oh, it's over there. I see it. Yeah. Well, where in the corner?
SPEAKER_15: Then Earl grabbed this red bucket, which he set down. It's like a knee-high bucket.
SPEAKER_21: These things are pretty nasty. Oh my God. That's from this year. But you can see, that's just this year.
SPEAKER_15: So many syringes. How many do you think you got in there?
SPEAKER_21: I'd say there's a thousand, wouldn't you, Mitchell? A long, thinning way. Yeah, close to it. That was like all last year. All last year.
SPEAKER_15: People on work release have been picking these up for like the past year. These are just litter on the highway. Yeah.
SPEAKER_21: It's been awful. They used to have the kids, you know, would clean up like Boy Scouts and stuff, clean up lawn rows. But it just got too bad with the needles now. You just can't do it anymore with the way the needles and stuff are.
SPEAKER_22: Yeah, that's all kinds of murre in there. Yeah, we forgot about the MB&E. Yeah. What would be another bottle full?
SPEAKER_21: There's probably 20, 30 in there. Here's another one. We got a problem here. There's no doubt about that. There's definitely a problem with heroin use.
SPEAKER_22: Some of them got it in. Still got the stuff in there. Still got the drugs in there?
SPEAKER_22: Blood, too.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah.
SPEAKER_21: Huh. That first year, we really found them, didn't we?
SPEAKER_22: We throw a bunch of them away, too, before we started saving them.
SPEAKER_15: Did it surprise you to find this many?
SPEAKER_21: Really, yeah. Well, it just all... The heroin problem just started just like overnight here. I mean, it was pills forever, and then just all at once. Nobody even ever seen a needle, did you, Mitchell? And then just all at once, they were everywhere. When did you start seeing them?
SPEAKER_21: About... About a year ago, wasn't it? It's been longer than that. It's been about two and a half years ago. And once you started finding them, they were everywhere then. So what do you think when you see all these needles?
SPEAKER_10: I just think it's a bad thing.
SPEAKER_21: It's destroying families, and we have somebody dying here just all the time. I mean, it's really bad. Sad. I've had a very good friend that I lost. What was it, Mitchell, back last August? Somewhere along there.
SPEAKER_21: I had took him to rehab, and he was in there for a couple months, and he got out and done good, and then that happened to him.
SPEAKER_15: And that was sort of the incredible thing. There's something for everyone here, so have your pick.
SPEAKER_22: All right, well, I'll take a look around.
SPEAKER_15: Okay. So, like, everybody knew somebody who had been caught up in using opioids. I mean, nice families, somebody in their family end up on them bad.
SPEAKER_15: Like I went to a yard sale because I love yard sales, and... I think every family is affected some way.
SPEAKER_15: When I told the women who were sitting there on the driveway what we were reporting on, they said they had lost neighbors, friends. Well, let's put it like this.
SPEAKER_28: In 2000... You know, one day when we were down there, we had to take a lift.
SPEAKER_28: So, in 1990, I had a motorcycle accident, which destroyed my left femur. I've got a 12-inch plate, 10 screws, and two pins that hold my left femur together.
SPEAKER_09: The driver told us how he'd started using pills.
SPEAKER_28: And really came by quite innocently.
SPEAKER_15: I talked to a woman who worked at a thrift store who told me she lost a cousin to an overdose. Actually, Jay told us about a friend of his. He actually relapsed.
SPEAKER_08: He was in therapy. His sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous overdosed. And he had nobody to go to, so he relapsed and was found two days later in his car. So it was pretty bad.
SPEAKER_16: And I would assume that the MS, Scotty and Jay, would have seen this shift happen. Yeah, Scotty told us around 2017, overdose calls...
SPEAKER_13: Went from one or two a week to... Five, six, one day... There was 11. And that was just unheard of in this county, just to have that many overdoses. They told us they would treat the same person like five times over a few months.
SPEAKER_15: This is just their job.
SPEAKER_09: Right, they're there to save people's lives.
SPEAKER_15: But this overdose problem and the sort of moral calculus that any EMS person makes when they show up to help a person who is OD'd, it started to shift. When reports started emerging about this new drug, this drug that made it so simply coming into contact with a person, like just simply touching them, could put an EMS worker in danger. Wasn't a lot known about it. We talked to this guy, Jason York, about it.
SPEAKER_09: He's the emergency management director for the county.
SPEAKER_29: When it first came out, the reports that we were getting was literally airborne. Have you ever seen it?
SPEAKER_10: No.
SPEAKER_10: What do you think, just hearing about it, what's going through your mind when you hear about it?
SPEAKER_29: World War Z. Walking Dead.
SPEAKER_16: The drug is called fentanyl. What is fentanyl? I know that it's an opioid, but is it like... So fentanyl...
SPEAKER_15: Didn't you talk to a guy about this a while back?
SPEAKER_09: I did. I talked to this guy, John Cole. Okay. Can you tell me again who you are? Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: I'm an emergency physician here at Hennepin County Medical Center, which is a level one trauma center in Minneapolis.
SPEAKER_09: He's also the director of the Minnesota Poison Control.
SPEAKER_07: So fentanyl. So fentanyl has been around for decades, and we use it almost every day in my hospital in some capacity.
SPEAKER_09: So fentanyl is an opioid. It's fully synthetic. It's manufactured in the laboratory. And it often comes in powder form, but drug companies reformulated it into all sorts of things like fentanyl lollipops. These lollipops are given to soldiers on the battlefield. There's also fentanyl patches.
SPEAKER_07: People wear to get fentanyl into their body through their skin.
SPEAKER_16: Oh, so you can do fentanyl through the skin? Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: It's an easy way to put something on for people with really bad chronic pain. People with cancer, for instance, use them.
SPEAKER_09: It's just this really, really effective painkiller.
SPEAKER_07: Because fentanyl is really, really potent.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, a lot of people refer to fentanyl as sort of the third wave of the opioid crisis.
SPEAKER_16: Just for context, I mean, what are the first two waves? Uh, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: If you don't mind. So if you go back to the beginning of the crisis, the first wave was pills. When the early 2000s, drug manufacturers began flooding communities with pharmaceutical-grade opioids. And the second wave was around 2011 when there was a crackdown on pills. And so a lot of people that were using pharmaceuticals began to migrate to heroin. And the Mexican cartels got very good at delivering that heroin. And then around 2013, the third wave hits.
SPEAKER_22: America's worst drug crisis ever.
SPEAKER_09: Drug dealers, people that were selling heroin, start looking to fentanyl.
SPEAKER_07: Because fentanyl is so much cheaper to either make or obtain than normal heroin.
SPEAKER_09: And most importantly, fentanyl is way more potent. And so basically, to maximize their profit, drug dealers start cutting fentanyl into heroin. The problem is that the people who are using, they really have no idea what they're getting. They think they're just getting heroin.
SPEAKER_07: And certainly by 2014, we started to see patients in our emergency department who were overdosed with what they thought was heroin that probably turned out to be fentanyl.
SPEAKER_09: And as more and more people were overdosing, fentanyl, dying, a powerful synthetic opioid,
SPEAKER_24: there were all these news stories about a powerful opioid, this fentanyl, powerful ultra-potent
SPEAKER_09: synthetic opioid, 30 to 50 times as powerful as heroin itself.
SPEAKER_07: And there are versions of it where the molecules changed a little bit and it makes it more potent.
SPEAKER_09: And by 2016, an even more dangerous drug is now hitting the street.
SPEAKER_00: It's called carfentanyl. It's a new synthetic opioid usually used to tranquilize elephants. Now this deadly drug is popping up in our backyards.
SPEAKER_07: And carfentanyl is extremely potent.
SPEAKER_02: The same size as just seven grains of salt could kill you.
SPEAKER_09: John says it was right around this time, 2016.
SPEAKER_07: There started to be reports of fall backwards, law enforcement, trying to hold on to anything I can grasp, emergency medical services. My face started burning. And even nurses in hospitals. I broke out in a sweat. Describing getting ill when they were exposed to powder that turned out later to be fentanyl or some other type of fentanyl.
SPEAKER_07: How did you first hear about it?
SPEAKER_13: How did I hear about it? You guys, the media. Oh, I forget.
SPEAKER_15: I'm a representative of the media. Scotty City actually first heard about carfentanyl in Good Morning America. Started reading articles on it. Jay saw other people in EMS tweeting about it. You know, what is this drug?
SPEAKER_08: What is going on?
SPEAKER_13: But that's in the big city. It's not going to happen here.
SPEAKER_08: And then one of our local law enforcement officers, Bud Lyons. So you read about fentanyl.
SPEAKER_14: I mean, I've read about it, but I didn't think it would come to a small city like this. So that's Bud Lyons.
SPEAKER_08: He's a police officer. He's a K-9 officer here. So what happened?
SPEAKER_14: Basically, I was dispatched to the funeral home.
SPEAKER_15: So it was the summer of 2017. Bud got called out to the parking lot of the funeral home. A female had passed out.
SPEAKER_14: In her car. When I got on scene, woke her up, got her out of the vehicle. She noticed that she had some brown stuff on her face, like a powder substance around her nostrils. He searched the car and took into evidence $1,000 in cash.
SPEAKER_14: And several little baggies of brown powder substance that turned out to be heroin.
SPEAKER_09: And that same night as he was like back in the evidence room going through the money. I didn't have no gloves on when I was counting the money.
SPEAKER_14: Started feeling funny. Started feeling real dizzy. Couldn't think straight.
SPEAKER_08: Dropped the money. And drove his cruiser up here into the parking lot of the EMS station.
SPEAKER_09: And when he pulled in, he went down.
SPEAKER_09: A couple of EMS were there, gave him this Lazarus drug, Narcan. Rushed me to the hospital. Had that ever happened to you before? No.
SPEAKER_14: It's the first time it's ever happened. And you know, just that little touch basically almost killed me.
SPEAKER_16: Just a grain of fentanyl got on his skin and he's saying that's all it took?
SPEAKER_15: Yeah, like that was the story that was starting to emerge really across the country. That like a tiny grain, if you came into contact with a tiny grain of this drug, it could take you down.
SPEAKER_08: So as soon as that happened, Scotty, we made it a pact between us to carry extra Narcan in the truck for us in case we ever got exposed. Because I knew it was here in the county and in the city. Then about a month after that, sure enough, chewing on steel at the trucking park, my
SPEAKER_13: partner got exposed. I can remember coming to and being in another ambulance.
SPEAKER_15: Jay had given Scotty their Narcan they had stashed away.
SPEAKER_08: His dose of Narcan and mine because he wouldn't wake up after the first dose. We got him to the hospital.
SPEAKER_09: Scotty was kept under evaluation for about four hours. And then eventually discharged.
SPEAKER_13: The next day it was like, that was when it hit. On the fact of, you know what, I almost died doing my job.
SPEAKER_15: And that's essentially when what began as a call for help became a crime scene. What do you mean? I will tell you in a minute. After the break.
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SPEAKER_24: Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself?
SPEAKER_00: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments.
SPEAKER_24: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. And on the media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_09: Something that I kept thinking about when we were down there in Kentucky driving around was that there is like no duty to render aid, even though there are some exceptions and statutes in some states. Like for the most part, there's just no obligation. We live in a society where you like do not, you can sort of watch a person drown and you won't be held liable. You can do that. And that's legal. I just kept thinking about that.
SPEAKER_21: We've mostly just been here.
SPEAKER_15: So when we were down there with Earl the jailer in the jail, the old Bath County jail, we had just seen the needles and we were coming out to the parking lot and we had spent probably like two or three days trying to find the people who were actually in the apartment, like the person who overdosed and the other two people who we learned lived in that apartment. I had a phone number, but nobody was picking up.
SPEAKER_09: But we're with Earl and I just asked him if he knew this guy, Scotty Hatton.
SPEAKER_15: This is a different Scotty.
SPEAKER_09: This is a different Scotty.
SPEAKER_15: Right. Because Scotty Whiteman's the EMT who responded to the call, had this seemingly like overdose exposure. Scotty Hatton lived in the apartment.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And he shared the day that Scotty and Jay showed up.
SPEAKER_21: Yeah, I know him. What, are y'all wanting to talk to him? Yeah, we just, I mean, we got the Scotty Whiteman started the story and we were just
SPEAKER_10: curious if...
SPEAKER_21: What do you want to talk to him about what went on that night? Just get his side of the story. I know that. I don't think that he could right now because his case ain't final. I just about guarantee you won't.
SPEAKER_15: But then he was like, I can tell you where he is though, because it turns out that Scotty Hatton had on an ankle monitor and Earl, you know, he's the jailer. He just like pulls up his phone and looks up Scotty's GPS location. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: And so the, the little, the little dot for the GPS showed exactly where he was at this old cemetery. That graveyard's what Mitchell...
SPEAKER_15: And Earl said like, we could go down there and like, maybe he would talk to us.
SPEAKER_15: So we get there pretty big and sprawling cemetery that was like 25 minutes out of town. Something like that.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And then we got to this cicadas.
SPEAKER_15: Anyway, Scotty was actually out on this riding lawnmower and we were standing there talking to his supervisor and then Scotty himself like gets off the lawnmower, comes over to us. What did he look like? Sunken eyes, big eyes. Pretty skinny guy. Wearing like a blue Duke ball cap. Blue jeans. So Scotty came over, his supervisor just went on the lawnmower and started riding around and Scotty immediately started talking. It seems like he wanted to tell his side of the story.
SPEAKER_18: He said he got sick. I'm looking online. It's like sometimes it can take 24 hours.
SPEAKER_15: And he was standing under this big oak tree, uh, kind of like on a steep slope. Sorry, mind... You mind, uh, I just, I missed the back of the front of that. You're saying that you, you think it's doubtful? I think it's very doubtful. And he immediately started telling us that he was like suspicious of Scotty Whiteman's story. Like this whole like overdose by touch thing. I mean, because he only touched my other co-defendant, you know, and I had washed him off.
SPEAKER_18: You know, I didn't know you're not supposed to wash them when it's overdosing off, but I did. And this guy's trying to say he got infected, you know, got infected by carfentanil. They didn't even find any drugs on the scene. They found very little paraphernalia, but I know I'm done. It's just one of those things. I'm going to church now, as soon as I get this ankle monitor off, I'm going to get saved. I can't get saved. And with ankle monitor, you can't submerge it. Where are you going to get baptized? Um, I go to Freedom Church in Mount Sterling. Probably going to ask them. Being in front of a bunch of people, it makes me kind of nervous.
SPEAKER_15: We decided to meet up with him later because of the lawnmower or cicadas. So we went to his aunt's house.
SPEAKER_09: He was living there. He'd gotten evicted from his apartment after the OD. Well, I'm going.
SPEAKER_24: Love you. Love you too. You're going to San Rubi, ain't you?
SPEAKER_22: Yeah.
SPEAKER_24: It's nice to meet you guys. Nice to meet you too.
SPEAKER_18: You're not Mexican. That lady's in there. She, I don't know, she really wants to participate, so. You just got married or something?
SPEAKER_15: Yeah. Oh, okay. So apparently Scotty's girlfriend, Jessica, she was the other person in the apartment for this overdose. She was also now living with Scotty at his aunt's, but she didn't want to talk to us.
SPEAKER_09: So then the three of us sat down on the couch in the living room and Scotty just started telling us about his own story. And I think his story definitely has, is a very like sort of common trajectory. Where'd it like, where'd you grow up?
SPEAKER_15: Was it around here?
SPEAKER_18: Yeah, I grew up in Bath County. I've been here my whole life pretty much.
SPEAKER_15: So Scotty grew up in government housing, uh, in a small apartment with his sister, his mom. She had another husband by then, not my dad.
SPEAKER_18: He's my stepdad.
SPEAKER_09: His stepdad is this guy named Ricky.
SPEAKER_15: Who figures pretty prominently in this story? He drank a lot.
SPEAKER_18: Wasn't that good? Wasn't all that good at home. Then I was like 15, 16. I moved in with my grandma and lived with my dad and my grandma. I was into sports. I made decent grades. Now I don't even hardly go see my dad. He caught him a case, I guess. He's got several charges pending. So when was the first time you used? First time I ever took narcotics. I was 19.
SPEAKER_15: According to Scotty, what happened was he got kidney stones. Never had a pain worse than that.
SPEAKER_18: Hurts so bad I was crying. He mentioned it to his dad. He had a motorcycle wreck, kind of messed him up. You know, he just said, here, you know, you can take one of my pain pills. It was a Lortab, which is hydroquinone and acetaminophen.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, he said when he took it, euphoria felt just total relief.
SPEAKER_18: I just like the feeling, you know, makes you feel really, really good. Not long after that. Getting his medicine ain't gonna lie and I'd take it, you know, take two or three years. And then it just, you know, got to experimenting more and more.
SPEAKER_09: Started using Perk30s, which are definitely flooding into places like Kentucky in the early 2000s. So this is like the sort of first wave of the opioid crisis.
SPEAKER_15: So Scotty said at first he would get pills from friends, people at work.
SPEAKER_18: And then it just, you know, got to, well, you know, I started buying pills.
SPEAKER_15: When do you feel like it crossed over from?
SPEAKER_18: Probably my mid-20s.
SPEAKER_15: He started taking oxycontin and he said he was working at the time stocking bread. Right.
SPEAKER_09: He was stocking bread. He was also working in a factory. Cause I'd be like, well, I'd rather work cause I'd steal off somebody.
SPEAKER_18: And I've always been that way. I don't really want to steal off people. So you're like, I can work and make enough money to.
SPEAKER_18: It was really hard. I mean, I made five, $600 a week and you know, I wouldn't have any left.
SPEAKER_09: Because he had spent all of it on, on pills.
SPEAKER_15: Then he was doing that for years and probably it was about like 2011 or 12.
SPEAKER_18: Heroin came around and that's when I started doing it. Because it was cheaper or? Cause it was cheaper because I was spending 80 to $100 on two pills. 80 to 100 for just two pills? Just two pills. You know, you might get a little bit high and it might not last very long at all. And you know, for 80 or $100 heroin, you can get a lot more and it's a lot more powerful. So that it just made sense.
SPEAKER_15: Scotty told us he did heroin for like five or six years. He didn't inject it, but he would, he would snort it. And he says he tried to quit a couple of times, but just didn't, which is probably just an
SPEAKER_18: excuse for I couldn't. I had to hit rock, complete rock bottom.
SPEAKER_15: For Scotty, he says that was the day of the overdoses in that apartment. Yeah. Can you pick up at some point? Like where, where did, where does it start?
SPEAKER_18: Um, you're probably gonna have to ask me like questions on this. Because I'm going to may shy back from some of it a little bit. So ask me again what you want. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: You're living down there with Jessica and your son Gabriel.
SPEAKER_15: So Jessica, Scotty's girlfriend, the two of them have a son together, Gabriel.
SPEAKER_09: And it's her apartment. And at some point Ricky is with you guys.
SPEAKER_15: Again, Ricky is his stepdad. Or like, why is he over there that day? Well, I mean, he's burned all his bridges. And what we learned is it sounds like he was last living with friends and like they had a falling out. Yeah. It seemed like everybody else had sort of given up on him.
SPEAKER_18: We felt sorry for him. He didn't know where to go. So you know, you can stay here a couple days. I mean, that was it.
SPEAKER_15: And then, um, like, I don't know, where would you start with that day? Um, really don't know where to go with this.
SPEAKER_18: That's fine. I'm trying to not, you know, save.
SPEAKER_15: I think last time we spoke, it was like, at some point, you notice Ricky.
SPEAKER_18: I can go from there probably a little bit. You know, I was...
SPEAKER_15: So Scotty explained to us that he and Jessica were in the living room of the apartment sitting on the couch. And then at some point, Ricky had gotten up and gone into the kitchen. And after a little while, Scotty realized that the kitchen sink, the water in the kitchen sink had been running for a while. And I'm like, why is the water running?
SPEAKER_18: You know, so I go in there, goes into the kitchen and sees Ricky standing over the kitchen
SPEAKER_09: sink. And he said he looked locked up frozen, like, like his arms were really stiff.
SPEAKER_15: His fists were sort of like clenched bracing, grabbing the countertop with his tongue plopping
SPEAKER_18: back and forth in his mouth. You can kind of his mouth barely open. You can see it. I kind of knew what it probably was. He's ODing. I get a chair and I get him. I struggle to get him in it. I get him in the chair and he's out. We have one of those, not only a fossil, we got one of those spray things. I was spraying with, yeah, I was spraying with cold water. I was thinking, well, you know, it might wake him up. I'm washing him in the face. And I did smack him in the face a few times. He just, he wouldn't wake up. So then I knew we had to make the decision to call the, the ambulance service. What happened snacks? I started getting a little bit, you know, out of it, I guess. I don't remember a lot after that.
SPEAKER_09: So I've listened to the 911 call and Scotty didn't really tell us this and I don't know. I mean, it's not that I don't believe him, but I do think that there was something. I do think that they sort of like in that moment they must have been a little like, what do we do next?
SPEAKER_25: Tuesday, August 8, 2017. Because the thing is they weren't the first ones to call 911 that day.
SPEAKER_09: First person to call was actually Ricky's brother.
SPEAKER_19: Yeah, this is Ronnie from Salt Lake. I just got phone call. My brother has OD'd at Bernard Heights.
SPEAKER_15: Which means someone must have called Ricky's brother, told him what was going on. They didn't know what to do. Because when he calls, he says something like,
SPEAKER_19: They're scared to call because they don't think somebody's got warrants and shit on them up there and they're gonna let him wear them back.
SPEAKER_09: They're not worried about outstanding warrants or like they're worried about outstanding warrants.
SPEAKER_19: Yeah, they trying to throw him in a car and shit. I don't know the apartment owner. I told them. No, sir, they won't tell me. Okay, I'll try to get there just so they can find us. Thank you.
SPEAKER_15: Bye. You go. And then another thing you hear in these recordings is this other call,
SPEAKER_15: which is from one of Scotty and Jessica's neighbors. One of my neighbors came over a few minutes ago and
SPEAKER_09: I think she's talking about Scotty is that Scotty had come over to her house.
SPEAKER_05: And he told me that his stepdad was currently overdosed in his apartment and that they were scared to call the ambulance.
SPEAKER_09: She made him leave.
SPEAKER_05: Because he was severely intoxicated on drugs.
SPEAKER_09: And from reading the reports, it sounds like their one year old son was in the apartment at the time.
SPEAKER_15: Oh, wow. Really? Yeah, their one year old Gabriel.
SPEAKER_09: I think they were worried about the police coming and losing custody of their kid. And so, so like for them in that moment, when Ricky was lying on the floor, I think there were some questions in their mind like, what's the right thing to do? And how do we, how do we do the right thing without getting ourselves in trouble?
SPEAKER_15: But they did make the call.
SPEAKER_05: I need an ambulance to Bernard Heights Department 301.
SPEAKER_15: Jessica calls 911. It was two minutes after Ricky's brother made that first call.
SPEAKER_19: Okay, what's going on? Is it overdose?
SPEAKER_05: I believe so. Okay.
SPEAKER_09: And I believe one of the reasons that they made the call that day was because they knew about this law.
SPEAKER_18: I didn't know exactly what it said. I didn't know that it came into my mind. Yeah, we'll be okay. A law that was designed to protect people in exactly this situation.
SPEAKER_15: It's called the Good Samaritan Law.
SPEAKER_24: It was developed because we want to protect people who care about other people.
SPEAKER_15: So around 2010, 2011, 12, as this opioid epidemic was escalating, a lot of states started adopting
SPEAKER_15: these 911 Good Samaritan laws, which essentially say if you're using drugs with someone and
SPEAKER_15: that person overdoses, we don't want you fearful that if you make the call that may save their
SPEAKER_29: life that you'll be in trouble.
SPEAKER_15: Like when the police show up, you and the person who overdosed won't be charged. You're granted immunity because you essentially did the right thing. You reached out for help.
SPEAKER_09: The sort of intent of the Good Samaritan Law is to make people who are in the presence of a drug overdose, you want these people to call for help because otherwise there's a greater risk that these people are just going to die.
SPEAKER_16: Where does the Good Samaritan, I mean it is a Christian parable, right? We got the Bible right here.
SPEAKER_09: So yeah, it's a parable in the Gospel of Luke. So Jesus is telling the story. And so there's a Jew, he's on the road to Jericho. And as he's walking along, some robbers come and they steal his money and they beat him up and they leave him in a ditch. And they've essentially left him for dead. And then another person comes along the road. And instead of helping him, this person like, you know, crosses the road and like just keeps on walking. Second person comes by, same thing. And then a third person comes and it's a Samaritan. And like the Jews and the Samaritans were like mortal enemies. Like they absolutely detested each other. But when the Samaritan sees this Jew laying in a ditch in need, the Good Samaritan stops and he helps this guy and gives him money and shelter and treats his wounds and you know, like essentially saves his life. So it's a story about like showing kindness to your enemy or your enemy showing kindness to you. I guess the other thing that's interesting about this is that Jesus is talking to a legal scholar. And so it's sort of about setting up like morality versus the law. And so like, I guess what he's saying is that if you see somebody that's in need, you don't think about what the law says you should or shouldn't do. You just help the person in need. It's like, you know, unconditional love, like takes precedent over the letter of the law.
SPEAKER_15: But then of course, there is the law.
SPEAKER_03: And what seems to be happening across the country is prosecutors are beginning to push
SPEAKER_15: back against the Good Samaritan. So we talked to this guy, Ronnie Goldie.
SPEAKER_09: He's the Commonwealth attorney. He's also the lead prosecutor in the case against Ricky, Jessica and Scotty. It's kind of weird that you guys got this from out of New York.
SPEAKER_27: And it's just not something that I would have expected, certainly because you know, we're used to our own little problems down here and I would assume you've got bigger problems in New York to deal with than what we were dealing with. But that's fine. I mean, I'm glad that you guys got down this way.
SPEAKER_16: So what did he say to you about the case? As Ronnie sort of explained it to us, you go back with our legislature and the way they
SPEAKER_27: have drafted the Good Samaritan law, the way the law is written in Kentucky is that if
SPEAKER_09: you call 911 for a drug overdose, you're only granted immunity for two specific types of charges.
SPEAKER_27: You cannot charge them with possession of controlled substance. Drug possession. Or possession of drug paraphernalia. Drug paraphernalia. Just those two charges. Well, we didn't charge them with possession. We charged them with one endangerment. And this is where you see this sort of pushback.
SPEAKER_15: One endangerment, that's a legal term for when you do something that puts somebody at risk for physical injury or death. It's a conscious disregard for what could occur.
SPEAKER_27: It's like driving drunk. So in this situation. So by adding the drugs everywhere that were laced with fentanyl, you created a risk, number one, of the child being seriously injured or killed based on an overdose or other injuries. And then also you placed paramedics, law enforcement, and the social workers that would have to come in under that circumstance.
SPEAKER_09: So rather than granting Scotty, Ricky, and Jessica protection, Ronnie Goldie, Commonwealth of Kentucky has charged them with 10 counts of felony wanton endangerment. So each one of them are getting hit with 10 felony charges. Whoa. Why 10? So there was one charge for endangering the child. So like the one year old could have gotten into the drug somehow and become exposed that way. And then there was one additional, there were nine additional charges. One for each of the people that came to the house that day. The police, the social workers, and all the EMS that responded.
SPEAKER_15: And I think we should say here that the Jessica who's now facing these 10 felony charges, the day of the overdose, she actually tested negative for opiates. Right. And their kid checked out okay too. But I think she's now facing these charges because essentially she made that call. She was like in the apartment and made the call. The other thing to mention is that like the thing that she and Scotty were scared of, which was losing custody of their son, that did happen. I'm not mad about that.
SPEAKER_18: I understand that. I understand that aspect. Drug stuff found in the home, they took him. I understand that. As far as the other things, 10 felonies, I don't understand them.
SPEAKER_15: But Ronnie's argument is that because of the number of people who had been overdosing in the community because of the local and national news reporting about heroin being laced with drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil, that you can argue.
SPEAKER_27: That's a risk that you knew was out there, but yet you're using anyway. You should know better.
SPEAKER_15: So it feels like, I don't know if loophole is the right word, but it's a way in which you can still, as you've said, you're precluded from bringing charges for possession of drugs and paraphernalia, but there is this sort of side door to be like, well, we can charge you for this.
SPEAKER_27: No, that's not the case at all. It's not like we're trying to say, okay, we don't like the Good Samaritan law. Let's go around it. I know that's not how I work. That's not how we work. This is the thing I don't really understand.
SPEAKER_09: It seems like the net effect of the Good Samaritan law is to sort of reduce fatalities and it seems like the data I've seen is rather successful in reducing fatalities. So you are, by encouraging people to call 911, you are reducing fatalities. In this case, if they hadn't called 911, it's possible that the rehemance of the patient would have died. So in some ways I feel like… Sure, I get it.
SPEAKER_27: And I totally understand it. I totally understand the reason behind it. But what I may think morally or personally, I don't have that luxury. I have a statute that I have to follow because when I took the oath of office, it is that I will uphold the laws of the Commonwealth. And if it's a crime, it's a crime. I don't get to say, well, but they were trying to do the right thing. If it's a crime, it is a crime and I have to pursue it.
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SPEAKER_15: We actually we talked to another prosecutor involved in this case. OK.
SPEAKER_09: Kim Hunt Price. She's the county attorney who indicted Ricky, Scotty and Jessica.
SPEAKER_26: You know, you have people whose jobs are to protect the public who have to be there. You know, the message needs to go out there. These people are protected as well.
SPEAKER_10: There wasn't like pressure. People weren't calling you locally or there wasn't somebody from like the state.
SPEAKER_26: No, no. There was no like no one calling from the state or anything like that. I mean, I just had my local people, you know, that were concerned about it. And was it the people who were there were calling you?
SPEAKER_15: I kind of think one of them did call me, you know, and just say, is there anything we can
SPEAKER_26: do, you know, with regard to this? Is there an appropriate criminal charge? Do you remember who that was?
SPEAKER_15: Um, believe Mr. Whiteman is who did.
SPEAKER_26: OK, so when we talked to Scotty Whiteman, we asked him essentially why was it that he
SPEAKER_15: wanted to see these people charged?
SPEAKER_13: I view it as a call for accountability. If they're doing heroin, we'll get out here and we'll roll around in the yard for a week. I have no issues with that. But when you do something that could cause harm to me, I've got a problem with that.
SPEAKER_15: I think, like, I understand that, but ultimately also feel like that they truly didn't know that like this is a drug that somebody could like brush up against or something like that and potentially have a reaction that there's just not enough knowledge there for them to have even a sense of the fact that they could be endangering other people. And then so to know that you had been through this experience with this accident, I always kind of felt like, oh, I'm just surprised that that you wouldn't maybe extend to them a sort of like, I don't know if sympathy is the right word, but I think that if you harm
SPEAKER_13: someone, you should be held accountable. You guys know now that I'm going on vacation, you know, September the 16th is a hard day.
SPEAKER_15: It's the anniversary of his truck accident where he killed three people. Is that Sunday?
SPEAKER_13: Yes, because, yep. So Sunday, I will probably lock myself in a room away from everybody for the biggest part of the morning. If I'm scheduled to work on September the 16th, it's the day that I take off from the morning till noon is time for me to pay my respects to them. And even though here we are coming up on 19 years later, I still do that. And it's just my way of dealing with it, I guess.
SPEAKER_15: What do you do in that moment when you isolate yourself? It's one of those that I reflect on that morning and I still try to figure out if there was
SPEAKER_13: anything that I could have done different that may have changed the outcome. What could I have done? Me personally. I still have nightmares. I still wake up in cold sweats. I'm curious, you mentioned this yesterday, last time we were here, that initially I think
SPEAKER_15: there was a lawsuit filed by the family against the company, but then there was a civil suit that you had to go through that you said eventually bankrupted you. And what I'm wondering is, did you feel that was deserved? Do you feel like that was justified?
SPEAKER_13: Yes. Yes. I took three members of that family away from them. That took potential earnings away from that family. Birthdays and Christmases missed with those that were taken that day. So yeah, I feel that was very justified. I was held accountable for my actions that morning. And then when you look at the exposure case, he needs to be accountable for those actions because he knew the risks that were involved. Right.
SPEAKER_09: Just as I think like getting behind the wheel of a truck, you know, on September 16th, 1999, you know, there could be consequences, but you never, it's, that's why it's an accident. Right. And the same thing if he had taken like, I don't know, two, two milligrams less of the drug, it's like, those seem like really, they seem like really similar situations almost.
SPEAKER_09: And I guess I'm just wondering, like, what's, why is it hard to forgive him for that?
SPEAKER_13: I didn't say I didn't forgive him for it. It's just, I think it needs to be held accountable for his actions.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, like all of that sort of like brings us to the big question in the story. What happened that day? Because if we're going to hold Scotty Hatton accountable for what happened to Scotty Whiteman, you need to be able to show that the drugs in the apartment or whatever was on Ricky skin, like could actually cause him to overdose.
SPEAKER_16: Do you have any, do you have any reason to doubt that?
SPEAKER_09: Well, well, the reason I found this story was it was reported as a credible report in the New York Times. Like everybody sort of acknowledged that, you know, first responders were going down all across the country. So but, but when I talked to John Cole, the toxicologist from earlier, he said, well,
SPEAKER_07: I don't doubt any of the symptoms that any of these fire EMS and police officers have experienced. He was skeptical. It's not a hundred percent clear if that's actually due to the fentanyl or to some other event that occurred in those moments.
SPEAKER_09: And John Cole wasn't alone. I mean, I started calling like doctors and toxicologists, pharmacologists, and they said that like the risk that fentanyl pose to first responders was extremely low. Why? What was their, uh, what was their thinking? Well, for one, I mean like the, the powder doesn't spontaneously aerosolize. It doesn't like poof into the air. So that makes like breathing it in pretty unlikely. And as far as the skin to skin contact thing, it's so poorly absorbed. The like substance itself doesn't pass through the skin easily to get fentanyl to absorb
SPEAKER_07: through your skin, you have to use a special matrix to be able to know if you want to make
SPEAKER_09: a fentanyl patch, you have to sort of use these solvents to get the absorption to even
SPEAKER_07: be to the point where it's therapeutic, let alone an overdose.
SPEAKER_09: Even if you put a fentanyl patch on, it takes, it takes a very long time for the drug to sort of like achieve a meaningful dose in the body.
SPEAKER_16: But something is happening to these people. I mean, you have to assume, so if it's not the drugs, what is it? She says, yeah, well, John Cole and a couple of other people brought up was this idea that
SPEAKER_09: maybe it wasn't the external situation that they're in. It was more, it was more something internal.
SPEAKER_07: There's no question in my mind that every one of these people, uh, felt symptoms that are very real. But John said the symptoms don't, don't really match the symptoms of a typical opioid overdose.
SPEAKER_07: For instance, hyperventilating.
SPEAKER_09: On opioids, you're usually breathing slower. Not breathing faster. Or a lot of first responders reported feeling a sense of great impending doom.
SPEAKER_07: Opiates are all about serenity and pleasure, not impending doom.
SPEAKER_09: And so if you look at the symptoms and sort of the stories that are being told about these new substances and these new situations in our culture right now, he says it kind of looks like a mass, a mass panic.
SPEAKER_07: So there's a condition called mass psychogenic illness. This is something that John Cole says he's actually come across in his work at the Minnesota
SPEAKER_09: Poison Control.
SPEAKER_07: There was a school event and a bunch of, uh, he said that about four or five years ago,
SPEAKER_09: there was this incident at a public school in Minnesota where a bunch of kids started like keeling over because, uh, they thought it was like carbon monoxide poisoning.
SPEAKER_07: Subsequent student after student began to feel ill.
SPEAKER_09: They took all these kids to the hospital and they gave them blood tests.
SPEAKER_07: None of the blood levels were positive for carbon monoxide. Just didn't check out. And once the medical conditions are ruled out from a known poison, you have to start considering other causes. And that event was consistent with this condition called mass psychogenic illness.
SPEAKER_09: And so when you think about, you know, first responders showing up the scene of a drug overdose and what's running through their mind is this like constant onslaught of news reports and other sort of anecdotal accounts they've heard about their, their, their friends and their colleagues that are, you know, passing out.
SPEAKER_07: It isn't, it isn't that anybody's crazy or weak. It's that their mind is causing them to be physically ill. They really are sick, but it isn't necessarily due to the thing that they believe that it is in the moment. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_13: My response to that is they, so we told Scotty what we knew, what the scientists had been
SPEAKER_09: saying. And Scotty says basically like, look, they can say whatever they want to in their labs, but this is what I went through. I just know the effects of that day that I came in contact with something that put me
SPEAKER_13: in an overdosing situation.
SPEAKER_06: Ricky Mays. An inmate at the Clark County Detention Center, Kentucky, who received charges for your overdose.
SPEAKER_05: Your call had been accepted.
SPEAKER_10: Hello. Hi, Ricky. This is Peter Smith. I'm a reporter.
SPEAKER_09: So I ended up sending a postcard to the jail because the jails don't accept letters because they're afraid of drugs getting in. And a week later I get a call from Ricky Mays. Ricky is Scotty's stepfather and he's also the person who overdosed who Scotty Whiteman treated. And he told me that there wasn't, there wasn't a whole lot of toxicology evidence or medical records or much of anything really. But, um, he had agreed to a plea deal for all 10 wants and endangerment charges. Yes, I pled guilty.
SPEAKER_20: I took three years. I mean, you know, more or less forced.
SPEAKER_10: You said you were more or less forced?
SPEAKER_09: Yes. Because Ricky's a repeat felony offender, he was looking at like 20 years instead of the three that he took.
SPEAKER_20: More or less the message you're putting out there is if anybody OD's around you or anything like that, throw them in a ditch and you don't leave them. It's amazing that the court system is putting out the people. That's the way I take it.
SPEAKER_10: And how does that make you feel? I mean, is that?
SPEAKER_20: Not good.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. I mean, it just seems like if they didn't call you, we wouldn't be talking right now. I said if they hadn't called 911 that day, like the Good Samaritan law sort of says you can, it doesn't seem like we'd be talking right now.
SPEAKER_20: They done the right thing.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
SPEAKER_20: They're more or less now they're paying for what they've done.
SPEAKER_18: Anything else you want to ask? I'm sorry, I just ramble on all day.
SPEAKER_15: Unlike Ricky, Scotty has refused to take a plea deal. Instead, he's going to risk up to 20 years in jail by taking his case to trial. I think about it every day.
SPEAKER_18: Every day at work for at least a couple hours, I think about it. And the same answer comes up every day, I have to take it to trial. I don't want them doing this to everybody, man. They're going to be afraid to call 911. I feel like for me, given the way it's gone, given the way people and how they think about
SPEAKER_15: drugs, like I just I don't, I don't know if I would have the same sort of like confidence or conviction.
SPEAKER_18: I understand where you're coming from. That's what my lawyer says too. I think when a few things come to light, you know, like, they may say, well, he did get sick or we're gonna say, well, he didn't test positive for anything. Could have been something else. Every little bit of doubt that you create is reasonable doubt, you know, and all you got to do is convince one person on that jury to say, no, I'm not doing it. That's all you got to do.
SPEAKER_09: Obviously, the jury will be making a decision about the case and about what happened in the apartment that day. But I think there's sort of a bigger sort of more consequential message that they'll be sending about what people like Scotty and Scotty should believe and what they should fear and what they should do going forward.
SPEAKER_15: If these charges end up getting dismissed or if it goes to trial and the people are found not guilty for wanting endangerment, like how are you going to feel?
SPEAKER_13: If they're found not guilty, then I'm going to trust in the judicial system that there were things that come to life that maybe I wasn't aware of. And if they're not found guilty, then so be it. And if he goes out and uses again and I'm on shift when it happens, I walk in and see him, guess what? I'm treating. My job is to do everything within my power to save his life. And that's what I'm going to do.
SPEAKER_15: And I asked the other Scotty, would you make the same call? Do you think other people would make the same call? If this is what's on the end of that call potentially? They won't make the call.
SPEAKER_18: They'll try to, most people, depending on who they are, they'll probably try to just leave the person, drag him outside or something like that. People in jail will say and do that. Or cover up everything at the crime scene or whatever. Or just not call. Like I said, if I knew there would have been 10 felonies, man, I don't know. It's still got to call. The guy can't die. That's what I believe. I totally believe that, man.
SPEAKER_15: When Scotty hadn't first got arrested for the wanton endangerment charges, he spent six months in jail. After getting out, he now attends church every Sunday with his family. What are you watching? Veggie Tales? Veggie Tales? He and Jessica have partial custody back of their son Gabriel.
SPEAKER_17: You like Veggie Tales? What?
SPEAKER_05: That's a tomato.
SPEAKER_17: That's a tomato. That's a tomato.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's a tomato.
SPEAKER_17: That's a tomato. That's a cucumber.
SPEAKER_05: That's a cucumber.
SPEAKER_17: And both he and Jessica have pending trials scheduled for December.
SPEAKER_16: OK. Okay, reporter Peter Smith and Matt Kielty.
SPEAKER_03: Also special thanks in this episode to Cecil Lawson and Jason York and Gary Beeler and all the EMTs and the medics who generously allowed us to go around and ride with them see what they saw.
SPEAKER_16: Exactly. Todd Tout and John Sunderland, Chris Kipley, Dr. David Yerlink, Dr. Dan Cicciarone, Fiona Thomas, Dr. Ken Williams, and Corey S. Davis. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. Thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_01: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Letif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Beccub Ressler, Rachel Cusick, Aketi Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pascu-Tieres, Sindhu Nyanasanbandhan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khare, Ana Rasquette-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
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