Attacks against healthcare workers in Poland

What drugs are being used in what circles is not being covered in the media... and some fentanyl users get very violent...

I was thinking that this is how it should be - that the police should arrive first. But it does happen that paramedics get attacked by the patient when he's already in the ambulance and the police has left. So, at least one police officer would have to travel with them in the ambulance to the hospital. I'm not sure how realistic that would be - the police in Poland is already understaffed as it is...


Maf... But what does it have to do with the topic of this thread? Are you saying that paramedics and medical staff at hospitals are being attacked by drunk or/and aggressive patients, because those paramedics and medical staff are on fentanyl and those poor, innocent drunk and aggressive patients are just defending themselves? ;D Or what's your point exactly?

I'm wondering if the current attackers (some or most of them) are not drunk or mentally ill but hopped up on something.

Is there a profile of attackers?

That's why I recommended to you watching that TV show "Niebezpieczne dzielnice" if you're interested in this. The type of people Polish police has to deal with (aggressive drunks, etc.) is usually the same type that is likely to attack paramedics and medical staff at hospitals.


A profile?
I don't know if there's any official "profile"... Based on my observations I'd say that in Poland it's usually a white Polish male under the influence of substances (most often alcohol). So, in theory, it could be anyone.

Maf, attacks on paramedics and medical staff (especially at ER) are very common - this is an article from 2024, so from before those two deaths occured:

wpr.pl/wiadomosci/818-ilu-ratownikow-w-roku-2023-doswiadczylo-tzw-aktow-agresji

According to the Jagiellonian University's research from 2018 68% of paramedics experienced physical violence - either from patients or people accompanying the patients. 88% of paramedics experienced verbal aggression and 74% - vandalism.

A fragment from the article (my translation):

"- Physical attacks on paramedics are an every day occurrence. And the summer holidays, which are abundant with opportuities to drink alcohol, facilitate such behaviour - Ireneusz Szafraniec, the chairman elect of the Polish Paramedics Society told PAP a year ago."

The chairman also pointed out that the attackers almost never go to jail for those attacks.

Here you have an incident from January this year:

wiadomosci.onet.pl/warszawa/20-agresywnych-mezczyzn-zaatakowalo-ratownikow-medycznych-pod-warszawa/whp7x17

Paramedics were called to help a guy that was beat up. It was at a birthday party for a 40-year-old guy taking place at a fire station - that's a typical place where you organise parties and potańcówki in Polish villages (this happened was in a village called Żółwin near Warsaw). Paramedics got attacked by 20 drunk men.

A bit more than that; they pay for the format which is the intellectual property of C5. A bit like the TV talent shows like "Mam Talent" which belong to Simon Cowell or "Wielki Brat" which belongs to that De Mol guy. Jeden za dziesięć (like the British Fifteen to One) belongs to a French company. All are rich from licensing their product in other countries.

However yes, most fictionalised cop shows are daft.


I've seen a doctor on duty at a well known Warsaw hospital be off his head on drugs. He was the only doctor on duty in the A&E department at that time and the nurses and patients in the corridor were afraid to go into his office. He was a surgeon...

Fentanyl? Like most other chemical drugs, it's easily available anywhere in the EU by mail order, dispatched from the Netherlands and paid for by bitcoin.


That sometimes happens, however I'd guess they prioritise. An old person who's had a fall at home, low priority. Someone acting up in public, high.


Probably no however there are signs. Paramedics wouldn't see those signs beforehand unless they knew the patient or there was a name they could out into a database. Even then, it's not an exact science.

I (unofficially but.... real) know of a couple of examples of fentanyl... (not covered in media AFAIK and dealt with within the professions involved).

Are you sure about that? If any Polish TV show is based on a licensed foreign format then there's usually info on this available. I haven't found anything like that about "Niebezpieczne dzielnice" though:

pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niebezpieczne_Dzielnice


Yes, as I wrote in my post above - in Poland it could be anyone male and drunk.


Drunk doctors are being covered by media (I guess it's easier for Polish patients to recognise intoxication with alcohol than being on drugs), so hopefully it's just a matter of time:

wiadomosci.onet.pl/wroclaw/pijany-lekarz-na-sor-ze-w-swidnicy-przyjal-22-pacjentow-nie-ma-zarzutow/mg9lpv9

Many are. They only usually credit it if that's contractual. There are occasionally rip offs however C5 is notoriously litigious so hopefully not in this case.


Or female and drunk. A police officer once told me that they can handle almost anything except women fighting.


With the one I saw, we first thought alcohol but there was no smell of booze. I'd guess benzos and something else rather than opiates however doctors around the world live with the temptation of opiate abuse.

:)))
Thank you for pointing out that incredibly important info, I wouldn't know that without you lol 🙄


To be honest, as long as they're not breaking the law - I don't really care what TV show is based on which TV show.


Maf was asking for a "profile" and from my observation the most typical in Poland is a drunk Polish male.

I'm not sure there's an easy profile here. People lash out at health workers for all sorts of reasons. Some reasons are excusable, for example a very serious and usually fatal head injury where it is normal for patients to attack those trying to make them comfortable; this happens naturally and the patient is unaware of it. Also psychiatric patients or people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour who can't be held responsible their actions.

In Poland however, alcohol is the elephant in the room and of all the intoxicants around, that is the most freely available and the most likely to cause violence however sometimes it's just someone's out of control personality exacerbated by whatever issues that led them to be in contact with medical professionals.


I wouldn't say it's incredibly important however it's always a pleasure to share knowledge and experience with others.

Sure, sometimes patients can be in shock, etc. But based on my observations, what I've read, etc. the main problem in Poland is usually alcohol.


You didn't share any confirmed "knowledge" in the case of the origin of "Niebezpieczne dzielnice" TV show though.

What the F are you guys talking about... people fighting on fentanyl and benzos!!! This is impossible, like it is impossible for a driver with Down's Syndrome to win the Monaco Gran Prix.

I mean, I suppose it's possible if you take an already extremely aggressive individual, give him some benzos, and then start zapping him with a cattle prod for a good 15 minutes. But even then, a 12 year old child would defeat such an assailant.

Benzos and fentanyl are central nervous system depressants that are literally famous for making people lose all motor function. Besides being limp - your situational awareness is pretty much zero. Add to all this - that it takes a huge effort to inhale even a full breath of air, because your lungs refuse to cooperate with you. Great fighter!

I think you may be thinking of people that are mixing several things at once - then yes, you can get some funny combinations. Fentanyl + Meth. Alcohol + Meth. Cocaine + Heroin. Meth + Benzos. In this way, the meth keeps your reflexes tip top, while the downer dulls your pain and removes your inhibitions.


Depends on the stage of intoxication. At a certain point, even Muhammad Ali becomes helpless, but there are other stages. At earlier stages, you can still have decently snappy reflexes, but already significantly dulled pain perception and heightened aggression - a combustible mix.

If you are dealing with a professional alcoholic, you could be dealing with a real demon. If he's in the midst of what Russians call белая горячка (Delirium Tremens), he may decide that you are Beelzebub sent to take his soul - and lunge at your eye with a screwdriver. For this, he doesn't need to have drunk much at all.

In fact, with veteran alcoholics, the best time to get stabbed is when they are sober. Sometime between 8 and 11 am, or whenever the first liquor stores begin to open up.

It's way more than shock in the case of serious brain trauma. It's a primal instinct to defend against attack and the patient is unaware and close to death. This happens much more than you'd think, especially after road accidents. They'd not show that on TV though.

Alcohol? Yes, it's a problem, especially solitary drinkers with steadily deteriorating mental health. Hard to know what the solution is.


It's always a pleasure to share knowledge with the less aware.

How do you know all of this?


In one of episodes of that Polish documentary "Niebezpieczne dzielnice" police patrol was called for a guy threatening someone with a knife. Once they arrived it turned out that a father called the police on his son. The son fled the flat earlier. The father said that it's enough for his son to drink one beer to go crazy like that.


If we're talking about attacks on paramedics and medical staff in Poland then I'd say it's the main problem.


But you didn't - it looks like you might have provided false info in case of the "Niebezpieczne dzielnice" TV show.

How would you solve it?


Never mind. The more worldly of us are used to occasional exculansis and forgive you.

By people not getting drunk? lol

As for protecting Polish paramedics and medical staff - you can read on the internet what they propose in this regard.


Well, the "less worldly" of us do mind people sharing false info and I don't "forgive" or forget that so easily.

America is a much more liberal place when it comes to drugs, than is Poland - I gather. In NYC, cocaine is omnipresent (though apparently the 80s were even worse). Weed is legal. Alcohol is obviously legal too. It's not unusual for an acquaintance who's beginning to feel a bit too tipsy, to snort some coke and go right back to being "sober". I would do it myself, if I didn't have a strong reflex against putting stuff up my nose - because it seems like an amazing workaround to being a drooling drunk at the party.

The methheads I have a good idea about, because there's simply so many of them. Their antics are on display daily. As you walk into the subway station, you can observe for yourself how they first use the syringe (opioids) and then immediately the pipe (amphetamines). Easy enough to guess that the point of this is to stay lucid for a longer part of your high rather than immediately turning into a vegetable.


That's one of the last stages of alcoholism.

The brain's hippocampus has shrunk. The liver is in such condition, that it can no longer metabolize alcohol properly. The brain is dopamined out, and conditioned to perfection by the "First Drink" effect.

At this point, there's not much that can save a person. Probably has only a few years left.

Hard to know what your 'lol' is about or how it's possible to stop people getting drunk. Even in societies where alcohol is proscribed, alcoholism exists. In fact the situation can be worse since the alcohol is unregulated, tends to be stronger and people are oess used to it. As for prohibition in America it was as big a disaster than the prohibition on marihuana and cocaine as well as narcotics in some countries tries today.


Fortunately there doesn't seem to be any here.


Whoever would have guessed...


That's changing slowly. I enjoy marihuana while at home in Poland and do so legally. And of course PL has a porous border with Czech where anything and everything is freely available.


It certainly can be. Sadly, when people are at that stage it's very hard to even sedate them since ethanol destroys certain receptors in the brain.

I don't know about the US, but in Poland the possession of drugs even for your own use is a crime.


Are you serious...


Damn...


The son of that guy looked pretty young though (the police arrested him later in the neighbourhood)...

It isn't possible - hence my "lol". Those attacks won't stop, obviously, but there are some measures proposed to protect paramedics and medical staff that you can read about on the internet.


There seems to be - provided by you here:

At present owning marihuana is illegal in Poland unless it's for medical use prescribed by a doctor or it's something not higher than 0,3% THC.

I mean... I had the same view of cocaine when living back home. You just don't see it very much in Russia, and the public perception is very unforgiving towards it.

In America I actually got to understand better what it is. Don't get me wrong - it's a serious drug - but to me no more serious than alcohol or weed. If it is actually cocaine that you are consuming, of course.

That's the real problem with cocaine, at least in New York. How "stepped on" it is. People cut it with inert stuff like baby laxatives, powdered sugar, lactose, etc - and this is fine. Sometimes they cut it with harmless other stuff like caffeine. But on occasion, some super greedy idiots add things like fentanyl to it - to give it a "kick". Unknowing and unconditioned users take this product, and then promptly die.

The NYTimes and WSJ have been writing a lot about this in NYC. People now carry test strips to test their coke for fentanyl, lol. Dealers that sell fentanyl-laced coke are actually going to jail (of course a white college kid had to die first).

So... yeah, I don't think Coke is very bad, and the tribal people of the South American highlands would agree with me. It's just that by the time you put it in your nose in Manhattan you are putting 10,000 other chemicals there that you probably should not be taking.

Remember - cocaine used to be an ingredient of cough syrups and Coca Cola.


Yep. My home metro station, is around the corner from a methadone clinic. These ******** go pick up some methodone, freebase it in front of hundreds of passing by tourists and children, then chase it with "actual" opioids. Some of them, like I mentioned, top it all off with a nice few toots of meth.

It's disgusting. They have oozing sores on their limbs. Children see this everyday.

@Paulina
As I say, I enjoy it at home in Poland legally.

If the "don't look" come looking, they can see my zaświadczenie lekarskie and my prescription and they can weep in frustration until their police uniform is stained with porcine tears.

They say it's medical however that's very often a pretext; I doubt anyone over 18 has ever been refused a script for it and the chemists that give the best deals have long queues outside for weed and almost no customers for anything else. The private clinics' websites often have racy names too, things like "zielsko247" etc and many of the doctors are either acnied with youth and doing it as a side hustle or addled with age and doing it to supplement their pension.


This is it. It's not bad at all unless you overuse it when it can really change people for the worse. And of course it's easily and relatively cheaply available in Czech.

About various intoxicants and stimulants, Cocaine doesn't seem to make many people violent unless there are other factors involved, marihuana certainly doesn't and nor do narcotics unless someone's in withdrawal. Billy Whizz can have some very bad effects on mood however not generally for casual connoisseurs. Sadly, that's all too common in PL where much of it is made. Alcohol is by far the worst, and paradoxically the easier to buy.

These things are only banned because of joyless American puritans in the early twentieth century. Even now a century later it's frankly bizarre that such a dangerous and socially destructive intoxicant is freely available yet in order to relax with a beneficial herb after a long day, you have to pay 100zl for a bit of paper so you can buy it and not be arrested.

Alcohol really is much, much worse.

You have to take a LOT of coke, or smoke a lot of weed - to experience the same kind of personality degradation and health wreckage.

Also, and this is probably important, weed and coke don't give you the *****, the shakes, seizures, or vomiting - after you haven't had any for a day.

Coke and weed literally have no physical withdrawal symptoms. Ran out of money - no problem - can live without weed.

If you run out of money when you are a professional alcoholic - ho ho ho! A very interesting journey is about to begin for you.

I don't care - I wouldn't touch that crap. I rarely drink alcohol either, I don't smoke weed. Fortunately I also never felt the need to smoke cigarrattes and I'm grateful for that, because I can see how difficult it is for people to quit smoking.


I don't know about you, but I don't need alcohol or drugs to have fun and I don't need to smoke cigarettes to be able to function normally on daily basis (and they stink like hell).



Guys, whatever site I checked cocaine is mentioned as one of the most addictive substances on Earth (yes, together with alcohol):

addictioncenter.com/community/these-are-the-5-most-addictive-substances-on-earth/

"1. Cocaine
The study found cocaine to be the most addictive substance based on its powerful affect on the brain."

I have no idea what they were studying there, but I wasn't talking about addictiveness per se but physical withdrawal.

As far as I know, and I could be completely wrong - alcohol is the only substance which has an almost 50% chance to kill you if you quit suddenly. That is, if you have a full blown addiction. Your whole life becomes focused around finding more alcohol - otherwise you cannot function PHYSICALLY. I never heard of people spending their entire day trying to get weed or coke.

Withdrawal from heroin may seem like a living nightmare, but there isn't much chance that your heart will simply stop.

From a medical website:

"According to a 2022 paper, the mortality rate for delirium tremens is between 5 and 15% with treatment. However, this figure is much higher if an individual does not receive medical care. Without appropriate treatment, the mortality rate is around 37% ."

Wrap your mind around that. You could already be in the hospital, with everyone busily flitting about trying to save you - and you still have a 5-15% chance of dying.

Alcohol fundamentally rewires the body - not just the brain. It teaches your stomach and other vital organs to rely on and demand completely other substances than a normal human being for normal function. When this is denied - the body shuts down. I can't emphasize enough how strong this physical need is. My friend - an alcoholic - cannot walk properly without alcohol. After a drink - he can (and often does) go to the gym for a long workout. It's literally like his medicine, and no one can tell he is drunk.

This is why quitting cold turkey is so dangerous with booze - and why doctors need to use various antipsychotics (like benzos) to keep people from going raving mad while their body tries to reset itself.

Cocaine and weed do not even come close in this ability to kill you.

Addictiveness.


Well, abuse of cocaine may kill you without quitting:

americanaddictioncenters.org/stimulants/cocaine/long-term-side-effects-of-abuse

"Heart attack is the leading cause of death among people who abuse cocaine. One report shows it accounts for 25 percent of deaths among people ages 18-45 who have abused cocaine or crack cocaine."


Long term they have adverse effects on the body and mind though. Even weed:

webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/marijuana-use-and-its-effects

"Studies note that early marijuana use can interrupt the normal development of gray matter, a type of brain tissue that helps control mental functions, increasing schizophrenia risks. Early exposure to marijuana is also linked to changes in areas of the brain that are often connected with psychosis."

Alex Berenson disagrees.... esp the super-potent varieties grown now, a world away from the milder stuff hippies used.

The difference between heroin and coke was pointed out, i believe, by junkie William Burroughs... (paraphrasing). Being addicted to heroin is like having a second stomach - as long as you feed it periodically you're okay and you don't want more and more and more heroin.
With cocaine... the more you do the more you want, there's no body shut off limit which is why addicts spend so much, they literally never can get enough.

Or as someone once said: cocaine is god's way of telling you that you have too much money.

In the moment, perhaps. If you started the night out with 5 bags, you will finish all 5 bags. If you started with 20 - you will finish all 20.

Kinda like cigarettes after the first couple beers. The more cigarettes you smoke, the more you want to smoke - and before you realize it the pack is gone.

Everything works against the other, because no one simple does cocaine and nothing else. You are drinking and starting to notice a slight slur, a certain dullness of the mind - despite the overall pleasant warmth. You smooth it out with some coke. But the coke gives its own edge, so you either smoke some weed or drink some more to grind off the edge. This causes a new round of drowsiness - so you do the coke again - and this way until 10 am the next day. Your Saturday is destroyed. On Sunday you are slowly returning from the world of the dead. By Monday - you are a soldier once again.


Eating a roast chicken every day will just as likely give you heart disease and kill you. Regarding weed and psychosis - existing can create psychosis.

That's totally different.

Alcohol is so terrible, that it kills you for trying to quit. I mean come on.

Hahaha! Exactly why I do not like to put things in my nose. Never know what you gonna get.

The bottle meanwhile was bottled at a plant with government supervision, and is sealed tight.