By Curious
When Norma Bacon (her Playa name) stumbled out of Rampart, BRC’s emergency hospital, on Friday of last year’s Burn, she was bewildered by a headline she saw on a nearby copy of the Wednesday Beacon: “Don’t K Me: Cops Used Ketamine in Self-Defense.” That story was about an allegedly belligerent Burner who went into respiratory arrest twice after a deputized paramedic injected her with ketamine. Norma wondered, how could the Beacon have reported her story so quickly?
As she soon learned, that happened in 2015. Last year it happened, again, to her.
Norma’s ordeal had started a few days earlier. The 30-year-old Burner was dealing with depression, anxiety, and PTSD and had been uncharacteristically erratic and hyper-anxious all week. She said she felt unsafe everywhere. A high-spirited heckler on the megaphone one moment, she disappeared from camp on crying jags the next. She, her husband, Evan, and a fellow campmate told the Beacon her mood swings aroused concern among some of her campmates, though she was not considered harmful to herself or anyone else.
On Friday, Sept. 1, Norma said she woke in her tent and experienced a panic attack. She went to the only nearby quiet place she knew, a low wooden structure her camp had built, declaring it her “safe zone.” She brought a tote bag of things she knew would calm her and a book. She found it soothing to rip out the pages of her book, making careful Moop piles she planned to clean up later. Evan soon joined her, bringing water, he said, to keep an eye on her and help her feel safe.
Observing this, a second campmate offered to contact a Ranger. Norma declined, but that campmate sought one anyway, Norma said. Subsequently, a two-person Emergency Services crisis intervention team arrived, according to Norma, Evan, and the campmate we interviewed. Norma spent some time talking to one of its members.
Norma said she felt better after speaking to the counselor, was feeling calm, and was planning to visit the portos when three paramedics arrived at the structure.
“I don’t want you guys here,” Norma said she told them. “You don’t need to be here. I’m fine. I’m calming down.” She said she did not recall any questioning, assessment, warning, or discussion.
The first campmate said one of the three asked for permission to enter and Norma said no. They came in anyway.
One of the trio pulled out a syringe. Norma said she yelled, “I do not consent to being injected. I do not consent. I do not consent.” They pinned her against the wall, while one injected her. Norma said she struggled, screaming “Get the fuck off me!” as they gave her a second injection. The first campmate, who witnessed the incident, asserted that Norma clearly informed the men that she did not want them there and that she did not consent to injection when Norma saw them pull out syringes.
Norma, Evan, and the first campmate asked that the Beacon not further identify them.
That campmate, who has known Norma for years and had visited her in the wooden structure, said prior to the incursion, the three paramedics spoke with the ESD counselors and several camp members. The campmate said one of the three wanted to sedate and remove Norma from the structure, citing a fragile state, dehydration, and physical fatigue as his reasons; the campmate also said that the counselors suggested calling in a team to talk with her as an alternative option.
After injecting her, Norma said the trio dragged her over the wall of the structure and restrained her on a gurney, resulting, she said, in multiple soft-tissue injuries. They then put her in an ambulance and took her to Rampart, Burning Man’s emergency hospital. Evan was allowed to accompany her, he said, but physically prevented from following her into Rampart.
Jim Graham, a Burning Man spokesman, wrote in an email that a Bmorg analysis of the situation “varies greatly from the description” provided to the Beacon by Norma, Evan, and their campmate. He did not provide specifics, but he did say that “her behavior in camp was erratic and she posed a potential threat to herself and others.”
After arriving at Rampart, Norma said she fell unconscious; when she awoke six hours later she was told she could go. She said she could barely walk, think, or function as she stepped out the door, alone, at sunset, without water, light, warm clothes, or shoes. She said she was not given any documentation regarding her diagnosis or treatment.
Evan had been waiting outside Rampart the whole time. Bewildered by the lack of paperwork or escort, he said he wondered if his wife had escaped. He took her back inside to ask. She returned to her cot and collapsed; it was only at that point, the couple said, that they learned she had been given the sedative ketamine and Haldol, an antipsychotic drug.
Norma said she noticed treatment notes lying on her cot that recorded 400 mg of ketamine and 5 mg Haldol, with a further 5 mg dose of Haldol. The notes reported that Norma arrived “screaming combative with paranoid delusions” and was “brought in by ambulance for confusion/agitation, found combative on Playa.” There was no record of injections given at her camp.
Norma later requested her official medical record. She said that National Event Services, the medical vendor running Rampart’s advanced life support service last year, told her it could only locate a brief “QRV Patient Incident Log” (QRV stands for “quick response vehicle”) that logged Emergency Services’ camp arrival at 9:30 a.m., a minimal level of awareness and orientation, and that she was transferred to an ambulance. This stands in contrast to the notes she found on her cot.
Norma said that she was highly conscious and not a danger to herself or anyone and, she said, not delusional. “I knew who I was, where I was, what I was doing… and I was getting ready to take a nap.
“It was completely fucked up and it was brutal. I want to know what exactly in my behavior triggered that response.”
In the Bmorg email, Graham wrote, “This incident involved members of our Crisis Intervention Team, Black Rock Rangers, law enforcement, and the staff at Rampart, our contracted medical facility on playa. We reviewed all available documentation (which included interviews with campmates) and communicated with those involved.”
Along with the contention that Norma was a potential danger to herself and others, he wrote, “Our review determined that all teams involved in the incident followed all Burning Man, local, state and federal protocols.”
In addition to the drugs administered at Rampart, Graham’s email raised the possibility that Norma was given a third drug in her camp: “Paramedics did not carry Ketamine or Haldol on the ambulances in 2017.…The only sedative that would have been administered ‘in the field’ at the event is Versed. It can only be administered by a paramedic after consulting with the Medical Director on duty.”
Versed was news to Norma, who said she was unaware that she might have received the sedative during the incident when informed about Graham’s letter by the Beacon.
*****
When she felt her anxiety attack coming on, Norma brought a tote bag of things she knew would calm her–soothing techniques she’d learned from therapists–and a book by Corey Doctorow, whose thinly disguised Burning Man plots turned out to bear an uncanny resemblance to what would happen to her. In one of his books someone gets body-snatched from a temple burn at a desert festival by a shadowy government operation.
“And I went straight for, like, ‘I’m gonna rip this book apart. It calms me. It calms me down.” She put the pages in careful Moop piles to clean up later, sorting by color, which she found soothing. Active in Leave No Trace, she wasn’t going to leave a mess.
“People hear ‘anxiety attack’ and they picture screaming and throwing things,” Norma said. “And hitting people. When I have an anxiety attack I’m actually pretty introverted. I need peace and quiet, and I need people to leave me alone.”
And then three men, dressed head-to-toe in black and wearing black sunglasses, she said, suddenly arrived and forcibly removed her from the structure. ”I kind of want to write him an email, and just be like, dude, you will not believe what happened to me at Burning Man,” Norma told the Beacon.