12 ms·
> He got 500 milligrams because they thought he weighed 220 pounds, but he was only 140 pounds and should have received 315 milligrams. 315 milligrams is still
by dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
> He got 500 milligrams because they thought he weighed 220 pounds, but he was only 140 pounds and should have received 315 milligrams.
315 milligrams is still.. a lot. Especially injected into the bloodstream (I presume?) all at one time. Enough to really wrangle your marbles even if you're used to that kind of stuff.
edit: To expand, that's about the dosage most people would get delusions of some sort, but not be 100% immobilized. That is a recipe for disaster around angry cops.
edit2: It's bio-availability is actually twice as high intramuscularilly than insufflated.. well you wouldn't be fighting the cops but dear god I would not want to experience that.
- dirtnugget 6y agoI was wondering how one could be so bad at estimating weight. But yes, it’s a lot.
- chrisseaton 6y agoHow do you estimate the weight of a person? I know how much I weigh, but I don't know how much anyone else weighs. I guess some other people don't even weigh themselves so don't even know how much they weigh. How do you estimate it?
- hutzlibu 6y agoHeight + bellysize + muscle size?
- chrisseaton 6y agoRight... how do I get a number from looking at those?
- rdmirza 6y agoCompare those values to your own weight, and pay attention when you hear someone’s weight to see if it matches your heuristic.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> pay attention when you hear someone’s weight to see if it matches your heuristic I don't think I've ever heard an adult male ever mention their own weight in public. You can see why it'd be hard to estimate when you don't have any data.
- quickthrowman 6y agoYou’ll have to get a job at a county fair running the weight guessing attraction to get enough data. There’s no other way to do it, it’s how we all figured out how to estimate the weight of a human. I’ll call my friend Chucky, he’ll get you a gig in a traveling carnival for the summer.
- fuzxi 6y agoOr simply any job that requires checking IDs. Bouncer, bartender, cashier in a store that sells alcohol/cigarettes, etc.
- garaetjjte 6y agoHuh, I have never seen weight specified on any ID.
- fuzxi 6y agoEvery US ID and driver's license I've ever seen (and I've seen many) list height and weight.
- tyingq 6y agoWatch a fair amount of boxing and practice that way.
- JshWright 6y ago> How do you estimate the weight of a person? Practice. In theory if you're doing this a lot, you should be able do a decent job of estimating +/- 10%, which is more than accurate enough. There are certainly other complications (some medications are dosed on "ideal body weight" (ignoring subcutaneous fat), etc...)
- mauvehaus 6y agoI'll second this. Climbers tend to get at least half-way decent estimating the weight of other climbers because it's pretty relevant if you're lead belaying somebody. In fairness, we're usually estimating the weight of people of fairly fit builds, but with some practice estimating people of other builds, I agree that you'd get within 10%.
- dirtnugget 6y agoOne more reason to leave drugs to qualified personell.
- wonderwonder 6y agoA very large part of police work is providing and reacting to descriptions of suspects. If there is no training on this provided then this seems to be a very large oversight. Based on the fact that police constantly arrest and harrass people who 'matched the description' perhaps there is no training, or perhaps the officers simply don't care and are just looking for a person that fits their bias.
- wonderwonder 6y agoI would be really surprised if they estimated this poorly and would guess they were just irritated by him and decided to up the dose as punishment. If I am wrong then they receive zero training when estimating weight and multiple officers are terrible at it. To mistakenly confuse a 140lb for 220lb is poor judgement to the point that it strains credulity.
- skinkestek 6y agoFWIW: My wife work in health care and just a couple of months or so told me how difficult it can be to estimate the weight of a person. She had recently seen some pictures with examples of persons and their actual weights and it had surprised even her.
- pessimizer 6y agoIt doesn't strain credulity for me. Most descriptions of the black victims of police brutality by law enforcement inflate them to a monstrous size, and use animal metaphors to describe their terrifying faces. Never underestimate the degree to which racism is driven by actual, irrational terror.
- ashtonkem 6y agoThere are actually documented cases of police officers in the early 20th century requesting heavier calibers and hotter loads from gun manufacturers because they believed their firearms were incapable of stopping an enraged <slur deleted>. Biologically, this is utter nonsense. But the belief that black people are tougher, stronger, and more capable of withstanding pain and drugs is a surprisingly common belief. Doctors are notorious for downgrading black pain in clinical situations as compared to white patients, and administer less pain killers.
- bsanr2 6y agoThe uncomfortable truth is that authorities regularly misidentify black men as being bigger/taller/older/darker than they actually are. Whether that's an issue specific to police indoctrination or to American culture in general, it's clearly part of what happened here. Apologies to the HN users who will be incensed at the notion of race playing a role in this situation.
- jhardy54 6y ago> Apologies to the HN users who will be incensed at the notion of race playing a role in this situation. No apologies necessary, receiving a dose of reality is good for them.
- dirtnugget 6y agoSo true.
- dirtnugget 6y agoEven today a common misconception among white doctors is that black people have thicker skin than white people or even that their nerv endings are less sensitive. https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patient...
- ashtonkem 6y agoAs I’ve mentioned elsewhere, cops in the early 20th century requested larger calibers and hotter loads from gun manufacturers because they believed black people survived gun shots better than white people.
- fortran77 6y agoPolice in the U.S. are usually extremely overweight. They might not know that a healthy 5'10 adult should weigh 150 pounds.
- dirtnugget 6y agoThat seems like an overly generalised thing to say.
- fortran77 6y agoThere are FBI reports that say the same thing, referenced here: https://inpublicsafety.com/2015/01/tackling-the-obesity-epidemic-in-law-enforcement/ https://inpublicsafety.com/2015/01/tackling-the-obesity-epid... and here: "FBI: 80 Percent Of Police Officers Are Overweight" https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/08/14/fbi-80-percent-of-police-officers-are-overweight/ https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/08/14/fbi-80-percent-of-police... Why on earth would you come to challenge something without first checking if its true?
- rscho 6y ago> 315 milligrams is still.. a lot. Especially injected into the bloodstream (I presume?) Iv dose for induction of general anesthesia is ~3-5 mg/kg. Or ~5 mg/kg intramuscularly. The main thing with ketamine is that it causes tachycardia/arrhythmias and increases blood pressure. While that can be desirable for people in shock, it is a big problem if the person is already under proarrhythmic drugs (e.g. cocaine). In Europe, we use antipsychotics for similar situations (haloperidol).
- wittyreference 6y agoI’m pretty sure the lit goes up to 8 mg/kg for IM. In the case of a 100lb pt, that’s what, 50kg? So they give the pt 6 mg per kg. It’s not out of the range of sanity, all else equal. Key point though: you wouldn’t give the pt 8 mg/kg in a fucking bolus. Time to onset for sedative effect is fast (10min or so); time to peripheral adverse effects can easily take an hour. You’d start way lower than 8, and work your way up if you needed to.
- rscho 6y ago> So they give the pt 6 mg per kg. It’s not out of the range of sanity, all else equal. Well yeah, but as I understand it the goal is not to intubate in this case, right? So in my opinion, 6 is already way too much. In fact, I don't think we can agree on a safe standard dose in this case. Which suggests that it's not the right choice of drug for that use case...
- shawnz 6y agoIt is a lot by recreational standards, but the anesthetic doses of ketamine are higher than the recreational doses.
- alchemism 6y agoI’ve seen club kids go into what I can only describe as an ‘ambulatory trance state’ at the dosage levels you speak of. I talked down one or two people from completely destroying their environment while in such a state, by using deliberately de-escalatory calming techniques. I’m aghast the police would use such a substance because it is indeed a recipe for disaster when mixed with their expectations of behavior.
- jooize 6y agoWhere can I learn de-escalatory calming techniques?
- BlueScreenDeath 6y agoThe Internet.
- alchemism 6y agoSocial workers and ER nurses, in particular, have field-tested practices for dealing with people who are anxiously disoriented — or violently psychotic - in a manner which resolves the situation peacefully. All I can say for what I did at the time was an intuition that I was confronted with a half-tranquilized, large confused ape and so acted as to prevent them from panicking and running amok with calm words, movements, and (most importantly I suspect in that state) caring touch.
- GordonS 6y agoPeople taking ketamine in clubs usually use much less than k-hole or anaesthetic doses, because the effects are more conducive to partying. They generally take small bumps over the course of a night. I really doubt the club kids to saw had taken anything like the equivelant of 300mg or 500mg taken IM (2x the bioavailability of intranasal), or even intranasally. If you are standing, 50-75mg taken intranasally can cause transient, trance-like states like you describe. 100mg taken intranasally (50g IM equivalent) is enough such that most people couldn't safely walk, and would have closed-eye visuals almost like a lucid dream. 150mg intranasally will guarantee a k-hole for most people, and 300mg plus would render all but those with extreme tolerances unconscious.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]