Behind the Bastards - Part One: Excited Delirium: How Cops Invented A Disease

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Robert is joined by Ben Bowlin to discuss Excited Delirium.FOOTNOTES: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/08/10/how-excited-delirium-is-misused-to-justify-police-brutality/  https://www.startribune.com/patients-sedated-by-ketamine-were-enrolled-in-hennepin-healthcare-study/486363071/  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9645173/  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05805-7  http://www.missouriena.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/White-Paper-Report-on-Excited-Delirium-Syndrome.pdf  https://www.floridatoday.com/in-depth/news/2019/10/24/excited-delirium-custody-deaths-gregory-edwards-melbourne-taser/2374304001/  https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/excited-delirium-and-the-dual-response-preventing-in-custody-deaths  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chokehold-police-excited-delirium/2020/07/17/fe907ec8-c6bc-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html  https://www.startribune.com/hcmc-doctor-says-his-police-taser-work-saves-live-but-others-see-conflict-of-interest/509447402/?refresh=true  https://www.startribune.com/after-conflict-of-interest-concerns-hcmc-to-sever-agreement-with-taser-manufacturer/511528142/  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/02/tasers-delirium-defense/  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was just shouting genocide. That's not a good way to open a podcast. No, that's basically the same as shouting genocide. This is behind the bastards, the podcast that has not once been introduced like an actual professional. There was one time you did it so professionally, but you were doing a bit.

Oh, I was doing a bit. That must have been the acid episode. I've forgotten which episode was the acid episode. You won't tell me. Tell me your theories of which episode you think Robert was fully on acid for when we recorded. It's one of the older episodes. Yeah, I mean, and if you're really, really a behind the bastards fan, try to figure out which one I was just fucking blazed on to CI for. But that's a story for another day. This is behind the bastards podcast. Worst people, all the history. Tell you all about them. My guest today, Mr. Ben Bolan. Ben, how are you doing?

I'm so excited. You know, guys, it's it's it's a wild time. I snuck into this office where I'm sitting in the darkness at turn off the video. So Wi-Fi is weird because everything is kind of terrible in general. But you know, it's a it's a bright light to to be together with you guys today. I wanted to tell you, I was talking, Robert was Sophie earlier. I really enjoyed the episode you guys did on the protocols of the Elders of Zion. I thought that was oh, you're another Zion head. A protocol stand.

Probably not a protocol stand. I'm not calling that. I'm really sad that Ben doesn't have his video on because I would have loved who's in your face just now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because I thought it was stuff people need to know about the genesis or the evolution of that kind of stuff and just how dangerous it is. So I wanted to just shout out that episode in particular. And I do wish I had I wish I had the video on. I think all three of us are far flung across the country right now.

Yeah, but it's really great to see you guys scattered to the winds. It's great to kind of see you and your Mark Ruffalo icon. Yeah, Ben, this is actually speaking of the protocols of the Elders of Zion. This has been a great week for genocide. Or I should say this has been a great week for recognizing historical genocides. Good job, Joe. Thank you. This has nothing to do with the episode, but I think it's pretty rad.

Joe Biden recognized for the first American president last week to recognize the genocide of the Armenians that started in 1915 and hasn't really ended by a lot of accounts. Which no other president had the had the Cajones to do up until now. And the best thing, well, not the best thing about it, but a rad thing about it is that Erdogan, the dictator of Turkey, shot back at the United States by threatening to recognize the genocide of the Native Americans that the US committed. And so we're now in this weird. It's like Cold War nuclear brinksmanship, but with the recognition of historic crimes against humanity. And I'm doing the right thing. Yeah, let's keep recognizing genocides.

Like, hey, watch out, buddy. I might also start telling the truth to schoolchildren. Yeah. I'll talk about all the horrible things you're cut. Good. Let's throw Belgium in here. Fuck it. Let's recognize all the genocides.

So yeah, this is actually one of those weird times where like stupid political dick measuring is seeming seems to be objectively positive. Now everybody's talking about different genocides committed by imperial powers, which I'm supportive of. So. Oh yeah. I don't know. 100%. Good. Speaking of genocide, Ben.

Wow. You could make a case that American policing has a lot in common with different genocidal regimes throughout history, namely in the use of state power to oppress specific racial and religious groups. That's kind of what we're talking about today. Hard to agree. Not quite, but we're talking about, have you ever heard of the term excited delirium, Ben? I have actually heard of the term excited delirium, though I am going to be honest with you, Robert, Sophie. I am not caught up with the textbook definition there. What are we talking?

So excited delirium in short, just to introduce the concept is a lot of doctors would argue is a fake disease invented by police to justify murder. Ah. And that's what we're talking about today. Now the story gets much more complicated and shady than that. This is a real really going to piss you off. But I think I should start with kind of the most recent touch point for the term excited delirium, which was the killing of George Floyd by now convicted murderer Derek Chauvin, formerly a police officer. When Derek Chauvin put his knee and his entire body weight on George Floyd's neck for like eight minutes or so, the other cops present with him knew that something was wrong. One officer, a fellow named Lane asked Chauvin, should we roll him on his side?

Chauvin declined saying, no, staying put where we got him. Officer Lane then said, I am worried about excited delirium or whatever. Now, first off, that's a very casual way to talk about or whatever, right? Yes. What the fuck? Or whatever. Yeah. Whenever somebody adds or whatever at the end of a sentence, that means they don't care. That's like when somebody adds for you at the end of a compliment.

That means they don't like you. Yeah. Can you imagine going to the doctor and being like, yeah, your kidneys are probably shutting down or whatever? You would not feel great about that doctor. So the way he used it, excited delirium, may kind of seem like a nonsense term to you. Even if you are a medical professional, I know we have a numbered listening, because most doctors do not recognize excited delirium as a thing. If you don't know the history I'm about to go over today, that term probably flew over your head as just a piece of cop jargon. Someone who isn't a doctor trying to diagnose a man struggling to breathe. But the reality of what that term means and how it's used is actually much more sinister than that.

You might be aware that the initial press release, the Minneapolis police sent out after Floyd's death was, man dies after medical incident during police interaction. Which is, yeah, medical incident. I mean, technically, that's like you shoot someone to death and you're like, well, he had a medical incident as a result of the lack of blood in his body. And it's like, that's not inaccurate, but let's tell those. But anyway, you're probably aware that Chauvin's defense attorney in a constellation of right wing bad faith actors blamed Mr. Floyd's death on a drug overdose. What you might not be aware of is that the term excited delirium is more or less an invented condition created mostly by a mixture of cops and the axon corporation who make tasers in order to blame mostly black men murdered by the police for their own deaths. The whole story of this is bug fuck and it will make you want to do things that put the burning of the third precinct to shame. The most immediate precursor to excited delirium, the modern term, was something called Bell's mania.

And Bell's mania was first described in 1849 by Dr. Luther V. Bell in a publication with the no shit real name, The American Journal of Insanity. I mean, do the page numbers go sequentially or like how weird are they getting with it? I'm going to guess it's a pretty boring journal. I kind of want to put out a journal that just kind of that's just titled you're not going to believe this fucking shit. Weird physics and deep sea fish. Wild, right? Yes, yes. And there's like always one article about poop.

Just so we can keep it on the nose enough. So Luther Bell published an article in The American Journal of Insanity based on his work at the psychiatric ward at McLean Hospital in Boston. He observed 40 patients admitted with what he called a fever in delirium and noted that many of them went from experiencing hallucinations, agitation and fever to death within several weeks of admission. Now Bell was taking notes on a very real phenomenon or at least a series of different phenomenons that kind of presented in similar ways. The most likely cause for most of the symptoms he was observing was basically a lack of anti psychotic medications, which didn't exist at the time he was doing his work. When those were developed in the 1950s, Bell's mania grew markedly less common as a diagnosis. Doctors today now recognize that most of Bell's patients who died were likely suffering not from any kind of mania, but from infectious or autoimmune encephalitis, something that also became much easier to recognize and treat in the early 1920s. These were a lot of people who were put in institutions with poor sanitary standards.

They died as a result of that, but because they were kind of acting erratic and agitated and shrieking and stuff, he just kind of like, oh, this is some sort of mania, right? The reality is they have fucking encephalitis in most cases and anti psychotic medications would have dealt with most of the rest of the things. But at the time, you know, Bell's not a bad guy here. He's doing the best or not to my knowledge. Based on what I can read, he seems like he's doing the best he can to diagnose a symptom and he just gets it wrong because it's fucking 1850 and no one knew anything, you know? Right. This is also, people forget. You know, we put, there are people who have done such excellent, meaningful work in the world of medicine, but we forget that medicine as an institution has these deep systemic problems.

Like, what was the guy's name? Sammelweiss? The guy who got the shit beat out of him for asking doctors to wash their hands? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a huge controversy. So I'm like, I know, like there, I love that you said bad faith actors, man, because there are people who are working in good faith assiduously with the best information they have at the time. So I feel like what you're saying about Dr. Luther Bell is that he's not trying to be a dick, right? No, not to my knowledge.

Yeah, not, not to what we, what we understand from the record. And I would, I would ask you, you know, I knew we're going somewhere with this, but I want to think about this. Like, one of the big questions, because I think I see where we're going here, Robert, one of the big questions is how would he feel about the way the successor of his idea is being used, right? Yeah. I don't know enough about Bell to tell you that, but it's, it's, it's going to go to some unexplained unexpected places. He certainly, I don't think saw this coming when he was, he was doing his best to kind of diagnose what he thought was a single syndrome. And kind of that story I just told Bell diagnosis this mania in the 1850s. And then in the 1950s, because of better medications, it goes away.

That would probably be the end of the story of Bell's mania. If it weren't for friend of the pod, cocaine. Yes. In the 1980s, cocaine in 70s, cocaine became markedly more common as a drug of abuse. And in 1985, in particular, Miami was rocked by a sudden spate of deaths among black female sex workers. 32 women in total died and upon initial examination, their deaths seemed inexplicable. The only hint medical examiners in police had was the fact that they all had some amount of cocaine and other drugs in their system. Charles Whetley, a forensic pathologist, decided based on nothing really that a combination of cocaine use and sexual intercourse had killed the women. Whetley decided that with chronic cocaine use, quote, the male of the species becomes psychotic and the female of the species dies in relation to sex.

It's just an incredible conclusion to jump to. It's the cocaine fucking that's killing them. It makes men crazy and it makes women die. Wow. And this is 1985, right? Bell, we have an excuse for him getting stuff wrong. It's 1850. Most of medicine involved haxos, then. Charles Whetley has no excuse to be saying this shit.

He wrote, quote, my gut feeling is that this is a terminal event that follows chronic use of crack cocaine affecting the nerve receptors in the brain. Whetley started using the term excited delirium to refer to this deadly cocaine-fueled mania he was pretty sure had to exist. Of course, he was fucking wrong. Better medical examiners and detectives looked into the deaths, exhumed a number of bodies, and found that the women had all been exfixiated by a serial killer. Excited delirium had not caused their deaths, but Whetley was off to the races now, and the condition he'd more or less invented provided a perfect scapegoat for cops who were increasingly getting flack over all the black people they murdered in custody. So that's, and Whetley really pulls back to excited delirium to say, like, I'm not the first guy recognizing this, you know, there's a history of the medical, and it went away in the 1950s, but then cocaine brought it back. And this is, you know, you can't divorce this entirely from the war on drugs, right? You've got Reagan in the White House, people are starting to flip out about the dangers of cocaine and crack, in particular.

Crack is, you know, more associated with the use by, by use for people who aren't white and rich, so it gets really demonized. And Whetley provides a way to blame people for their own deaths, when in the case, like, the thing that the name excited delirium comes from a bunch of female black sex workers getting murdered by a serial killer, and Whetley's immediate jump is like, no, it must be their fault. You know, he like completely misses what had actually happened. Yeah. Yeah, it's real fucked up. It's mind boggling to me because this is something that is, that is new information, the idea that one could take this metalevel of victim blaming, like to the extreme, it's over 9000 level of victim blaming and then say, and then have it be picked up as a convenient cause. And, you know, we've always, all of us actually on the shows that, that hang out together and actual friends, we're all very well aware of the problems with the official narrative of the crack cocaine epidemic. But, you know, it's like the big question, the big question about arms races too, right? Like, who's manufacturing the guns, right? Who's, who's growing the coca plants? Because it's certainly not someone in fucking, you know, Los Angeles. So it feels like, it feels like this is beyond incompetence, I would argue. It feels like this guy is intentionally skipping some cognitive steps to find this conclusion. Interesting. Yeah, we're going to be talking about Whetley a bit later in the episode. So keep a, put a pin in that one, Ben. So. Got it.

The excited delirium diagnosis spreads like wildfire after 1985. Since there were also an awful lot of cocaine overdoses in this period, very few people noticed anything fishy. One group of researchers in 1997, writing for the Journal of Forensic Science, did decide to investigate the troubling rise and excited delirium deaths. Quote, from a registry of all cocaine related deaths in Dade County, Florida, from 1969 to 1990, 58 excited delirium deaths were compared with 125 victims of accidental cocaine overdose without excited delirium. Compared with controls, EDDs, excited delirium deaths, were more frequently black, male and younger. They were less likely to have a low body mass index and more likely to have died in police custody, to have received medical treatment immediately before death, to have survived for a longer period, to have developed hyperthermia and to have died in summer months. In other words, most accidental cocaine toxicity deaths were of white people who died suddenly, generally not near police, because they were partying and doing a bunch of cocaine, right? And they just dropped dead suddenly because their heart blows up, right? Meanwhile, black excited delirium cocaine overdose deaths were nearly all black people who had been restrained by law enforcement immediately prior to their death. The study also noted that these excited delirium cocaine overdoses tended to have much less cocaine in their system than the white cocaine overdoses. So these are all getting blamed on cocaine, but the excited delirium deaths are overwhelmingly black, overwhelmingly involved police use of force, and they have a lot less cocaine in their systems than the people who are just dying of cocaine. Good stuff.

Does it add up, right? Say the quiet part out loud. Yes. Yeah. It was pretty obvious to the researchers paying attention from the beginning what was happening. But again, most people don't really catch on at this stage. Now, if you can read between the lines just a little bit, the picture is very clear. Cops were arresting black people for drug possession and restraining them. Like Derek Chauvin, a lot of these cops restrained their suspects in a way that caused death. Then they blamed that death on cocaine and wrote the deaths off as excited delirium cocaine overdoses. Dr. Michael Baden, a prominent forensic pathologist who studies deaths in police custody and was once the chief medical examiner for New York City, explained to Brookings, quote, This is the germination of excited delirium. The same people who did these prostitution deaths now applied excited delirium to cocaine users in Miami and people who died while being subdued by police. By the late 1990s, good doctors had started to realize what was going on in a series of studies were published analyzing all these excited delirium deaths. It became increasingly clear that the key commonality in most of these deaths was not cocaine or any belief behavior on the part of the deceased.

But the fact that they had been put in police custody and that less lethal weapons like mace or tasers had been used on them. One analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found, quote, In all 21 cases of unexpected death associated with excited delirium. The deaths were associated with restraint for violent agitation and hyperactivity with the person either in a prone position, 18 people, 86% or subjected to pressure on the neck. Three people, 14%. All those who died had suddenly lapsed into tranquility shortly after being restrained. The excited delirium was caused by a psychiatric disorder in 12 people, 57% and by cocaine induced psychosis in 8 people, 38%. 18 people, 86% were in police custody when they died. Four, 19% had been sprayed with mace and heart disease was found in another four at autopsy. The blood level of cocaine and those whose excited delirium was cocaine induced was similar to levels found in recreational cocaine users and lower than levels found in people who died from cocaine intoxication.

Now, it's hard to know the precise scope of the problem, but excited delirium deaths are, based on the evidence we have, extremely common. 11% of all deaths in police custody in Maryland are attributed to excited delirium. In the last decade, at least 53 people have died in custody in Florida. Some counts are more like 85 and were blamed on what was more or less a fake cause of death, excited delirium. Today, law enforcement officers are routinely taught in training that excited delirium is a condition characterized by sudden aggression and distress generally brought on by the use of illegal substances and often ending in sudden death. Excited delirium is not recognized as a thing by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, or the European Society of Emergency Medicine, which represents doctors in 30 countries. It is not listed in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, the DSM-5. As far as I can tell, only two organizations of physicians recognize it as a thing, the American College of Emergency Physicians and its British counterpart. And the story of why that is is pretty shady, but before we get into that, you know what else is shady, Ben.

What's that, Robert? The products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back and I've just promised Ben that this is going to get a lot worse, so much worse. And I'm making that promise to all of you. By the end of this, again, you'll be thinking about crimes, which is always the goal here at Behind the Bastards. Make you think about crimes, theoretical Minecraft crimes.

So we're talking about, I mentioned earlier, basically all the vast majority of like reputable international medical organizations where it's like a bunch of doctors and nurses and stuff. Do not recognize excited delirium as a thing. The DSM does not recognize it as a thing, but the American College of Emergency Physicians and its British counterpart do. And the why of that is a very shady story. But before we get into that really quickly, maybe not so quickly, I want to at least analyze the supposed features of this condition that most doctors don't believe exists. According to the American College of Emergency Physicians, excited delirium is characterized by, quote, bizarre behavior generating phone calls to police. So if the cops get called on you, that's a sign you might have excited delirium. Oh, next shit. Yeah. Next is failure to respond to police presence and continued struggle despite restraint. The syndrome apparently endows individuals with superhuman strength and makes them impervious to pain. If you're thinking, boy, it seems like people are using medical jargon to justify racism and brutality. You're right. That is very much out of the scenes.

It's nice but terrible. Everyone who resists has an illness that kills them. So if they resist and we beat them to death, it's their illness that made them resist the police that killed them, not us beating them to death. That's cop logic. Oh, man. You know, the whole time we were on the break, this was making me think of, you know, I can't be the only person in the crowd today thinking this. Makes me think of the way like hysteria got described as a legit medical condition, right? Yeah. But while skipping ahead a little bit, while hysteria was often at least treated by, you know, vibrators, excited delirium is treated with tasers. You also said, you also said astute listeners will notice you use the phrase less lethal instead of the entirely misleading phrase non-lethal, right? No, no. There is actually no such thing as a non-lethal weapon. If it's a weapon, it can kill people. It might be hard to kill people, but it will kill them if you really go at it. We should probably lay out a few specific cases of excited delirium deaths to explain just how often, like, this diagnosis is applied.

One good example is the case of Gregory Lloyd Edwards, a 38-year-old U.S. Army veteran with PTSD who was agitated and aggressive and stuff, you know, he was dealing with some shit. When he was arrested in order to quote unquote, restrain him, police beat, tased, pepper sprayed and strapped him into a restraint chair at the Brevard County Jail. From an article by Florida Today, quote, when deputies found Edwards unresponsive in his cell at the Brevard County Jail about 25 minutes after their confrontation with him ended, he was strapped in a restraint chair, his hands cuffed behind his back with a fine mesh spit hood over his head and pepper spray still on his face. Notwithstanding, his restraint was deemed to be of secondary importance when Brevard's medical examiner, Dr. Sajid Kaiser, established a cause of death. According to the autopsy report, Edwards died of excited delirium and complications due to hyperactive and violent state with subsequent restraint. His widow, Kathleen Edwards, was both perplexed and frustrated by Kaiser's finding. Sitting in a cracker barrel restaurant with her small daughter, she said she'd never heard of the term before.

What is that? Like, I know what delirium is and I know what being excited is, but what is excited delirium? How does that kill you? Good question. 85 people in Florida have died from excited delirium over the last 10 years. Florida Today did a review of those deaths, which took place from 2009 to 2019 to try and analyze just how it was applied. They note that medical reports for deaths in police custody are, quote, almost exclusively the only places where the term appears in medical reports throughout the state. So the only, almost the only time the diagnosis of excited delirium is given is when people have died in police custody. Most of these cases did involve illegal drugs, usually cocaine or methamphetamine, but use of force by law enforcement was just as common. 62% of excited delirium deaths in Florida involved police use of force.

In another 15% of cases, it was unclear whether or not police used force. 94% of excited delirium deaths are men. 36% of Florida's 85 excited delirium deaths were black men. While 70% of excited delirium deaths involved some sort of stimulant narcotic, all but one of the deaths that did not involve drugs involved use of force by law enforcement. From Florida Today, quote, One such case took place on February 9, 2018, when 20 year old Aaron Parker was reportedly found naked, bleeding and sweating profusely and lying in the median of a Tallahassee street. Police tried to handcuff Parker and admit him under the Marchman Act, the drug abuse equivalent of the Baker Act. The Tallahassee Police Department said Parker began throwing punches, prompting a sergeant to deploy his taser. He was then given a sedative by EMS.

Parker had to be resuscitated in route to the hospital. He died a week later. His death is reportedly still under investigation and police withheld use of force information from the public for a week following his death. The medical examiner ruled Parker's death an accident due to excited delirium associated with probable drug use. Parker's toxicology turned up positive only for cannabinoids, not stimulants. So this guy gets beaten and tased by police, dies on the way to the hospital. The medical examiner says it's an excited delirium, probably because of all the drugs he was doing, and then they found out he just had a little bit of pot in the system. I'm quoting this because it's representative of a lot of these deaths.

Wow, and you know what's interesting there is the immediate question would be, is there someone who has a cause of death listed as excited delirium without in any way touching on, you know, like law enforcement finding them and doing these horrific things to them? Like, is there is there someone I'm just interested? Yeah, there are some excited delirium deaths that don't involve police use of force and do involve drugs. A lot like some medical examiners will say, well, it seems like it was a drug overdose or someone whose heart stopped because, you know, they were on drugs and excited delirium is an odd thing to apply to that. We'll get into that a little bit. It is not always diagnosed for people who die in police custody, but it is predominantly diagnosed for people who die in police custody. More than three quarters of excited delirium deaths are ultimately determined to be accidents.

Only 7% are declared to be homicides. This is significant because when a death is declared a homicide, there has to be an investigation. It means a homicide, a death being a homicide, means that a person's death was the result of another human being's actions. This is why police like to have them declared excited delirium because then a death that was the result of a person's action gets declared not that and there doesn't have to be an investigation. This is why Minneapolis police tried to declare George Floyd's death caused by a medical incident because then it's not a homicide. Then there's no investigation, right? That's the value of this diagnosis to law enforcement. I see. That's cool stuff.

Yeah. I'm having a hard time articulating just how horrific that is. Oh, it's going to get a lot worse, Ben. You tell me and I'm here for it. I'm here for it. But I'm just thinking like this is essentially, at least in some cases, I think you've made a very solid argument that this functions as a not necessarily get out of jail card, but a stay out of jail card for law enforcement. Would you agree with that? Yeah. And it's a sweep it under the rug diagnosis. It's a we call this is this was just the result they took drugs. So number one, it's their fault.

And number two, we don't have to be investigated for how our behavior may have contributed to their deaths. That's why you do it. Dr. Whetley, who popularized the term excited delirium continues to be one of the most prominent voices in medicine supporting the existence of excited delirium as a deadly syndrome. He and other doctors like him theorize that these deaths are caused by an excess of Catecholamines, Catecholamines, whatever. I'm not a doctor, a category of neurotransmitters that includes adrenaline. Again, I'm not a doctor, so I can't weigh in on this one way or the other. But other doctors have weighed in on this. And one of them is Dr. Michael Baden.

He has issues with Dr. Whetley's reasoning. This is Baden, if an overproduction of adrenaline is behind excited delirium, why hasn't excited delirium been cited as the cause of death for a police officer or a soldier since they're also exposed to highly stressful situations daily? Right. Why is it only people who die in police custody, almost only people who die in police custody who get this diagnosis, if it's caused by overproduction of adrenaline? Because like, I'm going to guess a lot of fucking Marines would be dropping to this if it was an overproduction of adrenaline issue. Well, it really makes a good point. He adds, in general, I am of the strong opinion that excited delirium is a boutique kind of diagnosis created, unfortunately, by many of my forensic pathology colleagues, specifically for persons dying when being restrained by law enforcement. So that's Dr. Again, I can't really weigh in specifically on and call Dr. Whetley wrong.

I'm not a doctor, but Dr. Michael Baden is a doctor and he's weighing in. I think you're being very fair. Yeah, I mean, I just I try not to like delve too deeply into medicine because I'm not a fucking doctor, which is why I try to see what other doctors are saying. And a lot of them are frustrated by this. Now, I will say other credible physicians are somewhat more measured in their phrasing than Dr. Baden was. Dr. Russell Vega, chief medical examiner for Florida's 12th district, described excited delirium as, quote, more of a behavioral state than an underlying medical diagnosis. And in general, medical examiners are statutorily tasked with and thus more focused on determining and recording the underlying medical condition than the behavioral state at the time of death. That is polite doctors speak for saying medical examiners shouldn't care how someone acted before they died.

They should care about what killed them, which is about as like restrained away as kind of questioning Dr. Whetley's logic as you're going to get. Dr. Stephen J. Nelson is the chair of the Florida Medical Examiner's Commission and the medical examiner for Florida's 10th district. He said that he avoids using excited delirium in his district, quote, It's like saying somebody dies from cardio respiratory arrest. Well, yeah, everybody dies because their heart and their lungs stopped working. So it's not really helpful. So if you've been paying attention throughout all this so far, you should have a couple of big questions. Chief among them, why do some real doctors back up excited delirium as a thing if medical consensus seems to agree that it does not work the way cops say it does, even if it might be a legitimate way to describe behavior, it's not a medical diagnosis. Why do some doctors disagree with that?

Well, Ben, that's going to bring us to friend of the pod, the axon corporation, makers of the taser. Now, the original taser. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that sound. The original taser was invented in the mid 1970s. And the first taser corporation was founded in 1993. It changed its name to axon pretty recent recently used to be called the taser corporation. I'm just going to call them axon for our purposes today because it's easier. From the beginning, the major selling point for taser was that their weapons were less than lethal. Today, axon's website has a whole page titled How Safe Are Tasers, on which they currently claim that their weapons have saved 248,974 lives to date. They say that 99.75% of taser uses result in no serious injury.

Now, given that their business is providing a less lethal option for a force option for police, axon stands to lose a lot of money each time somebody's heart stops because they get tased repeatedly. So decades ago, they decided to make sure that that would not happen. Step one was to hire as many doctors as they could buy men and women who would take axon money to carry out studies proving the safety of tasers and who would be willing to take to the stand in order to defend America's favorite electrocution tool from claims that people sometimes died when shot with it. One of their first paid experts was Dr. Wetley, the same man who popularized excited delirium as a diagnosis back in the mid-1980s. That's right, he's an axon employee. There we go.

Oh, well done. I didn't want to pause to guess because they didn't want to see prejudice or unfair. So it's kind of like a company that makes ship-proof pants and saying, new studies find shitting your pants randomly is amazing on multiple levels, right? Provides a wide variety of health benefits. That's terrible. So this is our bastard, huh? Well, there's a bunch of them actually.

A lot of doctors are taking that axon cash, it turns out. Now, I don't know precisely when Dr. Wetley started working for axon. In 2017, Reuters interviewed him as part of an incredibly detailed investigation they did into taser deaths, a really wonderful piece of work. Dr. Wetley claimed that the company had approached him, quote, more than a decade ago, which conveniently could mean anything from the early aughts to the late 90s when taser started taking off. We don't know exactly when. Now, quote from Reuters. Wetley said that excited delirium is a genuine condition and that the vast majority of deaths involving tasers he studied were caused by it. I've never seen a case where I could say that a taser actually contributed to the death, he said.

As far as interfering with the heart rhythm, he added, there's never been any convincing evidence that that can actually take place. Now, one person who disagrees with Dr. Wetley is Dr. Werner Spitz, one of the foremost forensic pathologists in the country. He testified at the OJ Simpson civil trial and at one point was called in to review the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy. Spitz has seen a number of cases where a taser caused death and when informed of Dr. Wetley's claim to the contrary, he told Reuters, quote, if you fire a taser into the pre-cordial area where the heart is, whether the front or back, the electric current may very well interfere with the electrical impulses that go to the heart. But I mean, I'm sure we can trust Dr. Wetley on this. You know, he doesn't have a conflict of interest. No, no. Reliable, credible.

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We are back. We're back and we're talking about whether or not it's possible to be killed by a taser, which a lot of doctors say absolutely. There's hundreds of evidence of cases where that's happened, in which Dr. Charles Wetley paid employee of the Axon Corporation says, No, never. Imagine if guns work this way. I mean, gun companies have fought hard to be immune not just to liability for what their products are used for, but to be immune to liability if they make guns that fire when they're not supposed to. Look up Taurus. There was a case where their safeties didn't work and a bunch of people had their guns fire randomly into their legs and died, and Taurus wasn't liable because, again, it's America.

Weapons manufacturers have the inherent right to argue that their weapons don't harm people even when they do. And that's cool, I guess. Can I just say you see things like this happen on a daily basis, and I don't know about you guys, but I can't even slide on like overdue finds at the library. You know what I mean? Like Blockbuster, knowing my luck will probably come find me at some point because I never gave back Police Academy. No, they'll fucking tase the shit out of you over that Police Academy DVD. At least it's not Police Academy too. If you die over Police Academy, that's OK. Dying over Police Academy too is a bridge too far. Yeah, yeah. No, it's given me a dark night of the soul more than once, to be honest. But you're right, like the temerity to, especially if you're a medical professional, right?

One could make the argument that, OK, funding I have received or my employer does not affect my professional opinion. I think it's a bullshit argument, but it's an argument people can make. But to do that on top of this sort of layer cake of, you know, pardon me, of actively ignoring a mountain of evidence. That just seems like, I don't like it. What point do you get your license revoked? You know what I mean? It seems like never. And it's like, yeah, it's very shady. That's a big part of the story that we're going to get into, because Whetley is not the only doctor who's double dipping in this way. Now, when I first started digging into this subject and was trying to, I was trying to answer the question, is excited delirium real or is it something that the cops invented?

And that article in Florida today that I've quoted from brought me to Dr. Deborah Mash, who's a professor emeritus at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine. According to the article, she's been studying the concept of excited delirium for decades. She is one of the most prominent medical voices who will argue that it is a real syndrome. I can't argue with her credentials, but from the beginning, some of her arguments sounded odd to me. Quote, people are in a psychiatric state and that condition is a delirium, this delirium that people experience, which is why police get involved in the first place. So that's odd. Again, she's going back to that excited delirium. One of the ways we recognize it is if the cops get called on you, which seems like a weird thing for a medical diagnosis to be.

Now, Mash has published a variety of peer-reviewed articles making the case for excited delirium as a real thing. And as far as I can tell, I think she's the first person who traced it to Bell's mania. It might have been Whetley. I'm not exactly certain on that. They both, I think, will make that argument. Mash has published a variety of peer-reviewed articles in which she makes the case for excited delirium being well documented and founded in medicine and medical history, tracing its early description to Bell's mania. Florida today asked her for her take on the Gregory Edwards case. That's the vet with PTSD who died after being tased and restrained and maced. She agreed that Edwards was suffering from excited delirium, but she also called his death unnecessary,

arguing that he should have been taken to a hospital rather than being put into custody. And she threads an interesting needle here, sort of throwing some soft blame on law enforcement for the man's death, but she stopped short of actually saying that anything in particular they did or any tool that they used killed him. The feeling you get reading her answer is that his excited delirium killed him because he did not receive medical treatment for it. Now, this sounds a lot more reasonable than the standard law enforcement line. He died because he was on drugs, but it really is just a variant of the same thing. His death was unnecessary, but he was not killed as a direct result of police use of force. Hmm. Hmm. Bad faith. Bad, bad. Yeah. On that argument, right? Mm hmm. It does seem like a bad faith argument. Would you be surprised to know that Dr. Debra Marsh's mentor is one Dr. Charles Wettley? Absolutely fucking not. Yeah. She calls him her mentor.

And he's probably the person who recommended that the Axon Corporation hire her to be an expert witness in more than a dozen lawsuits. Oh, that's so dirty. That is so dirty. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's that good shit. That's that good, good grifting shit. Wow. The grift is strong. Wow. These people are like the evil, the taser doctors are like the evil version of the pot doctors, right? In California, before it was legal, we used to have all these pot doctors who were like clearly doctors who had been disgraced or wanted to retire and would just be like, I used to be a fucking oncologist. I saw too many people die. Now I like get drunk in a room and tell people, give people pot prescriptions. And that was fine. Like I have no issue with those doctors. That was a good time, actually. It was amazing because anytime I want to because I used to smoke a ton back then and it was it wasn't like I'm not just getting wasted during the day I'm taking prescribed medicine, sir. You just go down to Venice Beach and there'd be some guys in white coats. The doctor is in. Yeah. My favorite doctor was like horribly sunburned long white hair, like an old hippie wearing like board shorts and a t-shirt with a lab coat over them. And outside of his office on Venice Beach, there was like bolted to the wall of a day glow painting of the Mona Lisa with a blunt in her hand.

It felt very medical. Wow. And super subtle too, right? Very subtle. Yeah. These taser doctors are not more subtle than the pot doctors. But while the pot doctors are like, I'm tired of practicing medicine, I just want to make enough money to retire telling people they could smoke pot. These guys are like, I'm not tired of medicine, but I would like to make money justifying deaths due to police use of force and tasers by claiming that tasers didn't kill them drugs did, which is a lot worse. So you'll see Dr. Deborah Mache quoted a lot as a subject matter expert on excited delirium. That Florida Today article quoted Mache at length but did not note her financial relationship with axon. The thing that makes Dr. Mache brilliant is her ability to express total sympathy for victims and seem like she's not defending the cops while averting all responsibility from the cops. She told Reuters that the Edwards case was heartbreaking and avoided the obviously chuddy move of blaming the victim directly. Instead, she blamed budgetary constraints and the health care system.

Quote, he was failed by health care providers and the jails don't have the money for the staffing that they need. They need the nurse practitioners who are trained in psychiatry to identify the problem. See, it's not the cops fault. It's that it's the fact that they don't have enough money to have nurses in the jail. We got to give the cops more money and then these people won't be dying because obviously the cops will spend that money on nurses and not on more tasers. Oh, God, you know, I'm golf clapping at that matrix dodge. Yeah, make sure the sound goes in. It's impressive. Like she's not a dumb person. Which is why Axon pays her. Mache is so valuable to Axon that she's become their point woman in Florida whenever someone gets killed by a taser. But Axon is a big company and they employ a number of other medical experts in different states. And in part two of this episode, Ben, we're going to talk about the saga of Dr. Jeffrey Ho. But that's going to have to come Thursday because because we are done for the day, given a given a nice little bit of background. So, Ben, you got some plugs for us. How are you doing? You got some plugs? Oh, yeah.

First off, I'd like to thank everybody at Axon. They're they're paying me for a period on this show and party. No. Yeah, yeah. So if if you like behind the bastards, we hope you check out stuff they don't want you to know. It's a show I do with critical thinking applied to corruption and conspiracy theories. You can also check out the show Ridiculous History, which is exactly what it sounds like. We were not super fucking creative with the name, to be honest with you. And you can also find a find me on Twitter or Instagram where I am at Ben Boland. This is amazingly depressing, Robert. Yes, it's pretty much a bummer. Yes.

And I hope everybody makes it safely to Thursday. Yes. Avoid the cops. Don't get tased. And if you get excited, don't be delirious, I guess. Don't be delirious. Eat Doritos. Oh, boy. We haven't had a Doritos plug in a minute. We'll catch up on Thursday. We'll talk about Jeffery Ho. We'll throw out some ads from our new sponsor, Linco Industries, maker of the Bearcat G3, which is, of course, the most popular wheeled armored response vehicle by American law enforcement SWAT teams.

Linco, if you are a small police department who needs a vehicle that can take an explosion for no real reason, your best bet is Linco. That's the episode. Yeah. Ah, good times. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.