Emergency Room Quotes & Sayings

Emergency Rooms ... were the nightmares your nightmares had while they slept. — Nicole Deese

A child gets a fever in the United States and it's high enough and sustainable enough, all of us can bring a child to an emergency room. Most Haitians never had that opportunity. They didn't have the emergency room to bring them to. Virtually every time your child has 102 fever, you wait for it to die and you have no clean water to give it. — Sean Penn

I'd watch your mouth", he said, tilting his head as he looked at my ID."The last lunker who laughed at her picture spent the night in the emergency room with a drink umbrella jammed up his nose". — Kim Harrison

There are always going to be hospital dramas because if you're sitting in an emergency room for two hours, I guarantee you you are going to see something that makes you gasp. That's where drama comes from. — Rocky Carroll

08/14/1025h. Dessert Competitions.
08/14/1315h. Illinois State Fair Infirmary; then motel; then Springfield Memorial Medical Center Emergency Room for distention and possible rupture of transverse colon (false alarm); then motel; incapacitated till well after sunset; whole day a washout; incredibly embarrassing, unprofessional; indescribable. Delete entire day. — David Foster Wallace

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too. — Anna Quindlen

Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life's nature: that lives and hearts get broken -- those of people we love, those of people we'll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers. — Anne Lamott

I found out that colonels can stay until they drop dead or get a walker and being a critical medical specialty as an Army trained emergency room doctor, I could stay until age 67. — Gerald Griffin

No one should have to choose between medicine and other necessities. No one should have to use the emergency room every time a child gets sick. And no one should have to live in constant fear that a medical problem will become a financial crisis. — Brad Henry

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. — Jeffrey Eugenides

[ ... ] I always wondered how love could translate into an emergency room visit. — Lisa Kleypas

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room. — Larry Wall

Marriage My husband likes to watch the cooking shows, the building shows, the Discovery Channel, and the surgery channel. Last night he told us about a man who came into the emergency room with a bayonet stuck entirely through his skull and brain. Did they get it out? We all asked. They did. And the man was ok because the blade went exactly between the two halves without severing them. And who had shoved this bayonet into the man's head? His wife. A strong woman, someone said. And everyone else agreed. — Marie Howe

Community health centers do a great deal with limited resources. They provide critical medical care services to many who would otherwise have no other place to go or would end up in an emergency room. — Jan Schakowsky

Too many Americans who are uninsured or under-insured do not receive regular checkups because they can't afford coverage or their insurance doesn't cover enough of the costs. The lack of preventive care results in countless emergency room visits and health care disasters for families. — Jeff Merkley

Linde's Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting. — Tanya Luhrmann

You know she'll probably be at the party tonight? Which is why I'm absolutely not going if we don't get some coke.'
'Egon, why is it that every single time you're obliged to be in the same room with one of your ex-girlfriends you have to make it into a huge emergency? It's incredibly boring.'
'Come on. You know how it is. You catch sight of an old flame and get this breathless
animal prickle like a fox in a room with a hound. And then all night you have to seem carefree and successful and elated, which is a pretence that for some reason you feel no choice but to maintain even though you know they're better qualified than anyone else
in the world to detect immediately that you're really the same hapless cunt as ever.'
'That's adolescent. The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate and predictable that you have so few of them. It's one of those elegant self-regulating systems that one so often finds in nature. — Ned Beauman

She saw the beginning of puzzlement cross his face, and then there was an explosion and the door of the room blew open in a shower of splinters.
Magnus strode in, looking hectic, his black hair sticking up and his clothes rumpled.
Jace leaned away from Clary, but only slightly. His eyes were narrowed. "I would say 'Don't you knock?' but it seems evident you don't," he said. "We are, however, busy."
Magnus waved a dismissive hand. "I've walked in on your ancestors doing worse," he said. "Besides, it's an emergency."
"Magnus," said Clary, "this better not be about the flowers. Or the cake."
Magnus scoffed. "I said an emergency. This is an engagement party, not the Battle of Normandy."
"The battle of what?" said Jace, who was not up on his mundane history. — Cassandra Clare

There are nearly 1 million Americans who visit the emergency room each year because of dental pain at a cost that runs into the hundreds of millions. — Miles O'Brien

Obamacare takes effect in less than eight months. Do you realize what this means? If you go to the emergency room now, you'll be covered by the time you finally see a doctor. — Stephen Colbert

Sometimes, when I find it hard to sleep, I'll think of when we first met, of the newness of each other's body, and my impatience to know everything about this person. Looking back, I should have taken it more slowly, measured him out over the course of fifty years rather than cramming him in so quickly. By the end of our first month together, he'd been so thoroughly interrogated that all I had left was breaking news - what little had happened in the few hours since I'd last seen him. Were he a cop or an emergency-room doctor, there might have been a lot to catch up on, but, like me, Hugh works alone, so there was never much to report. "I ate some potato chips," he might say, to which I'd reply, "What kind?" or "That's funny, so did I!" More often than not we'd just breathe into our separate receivers.
Are you still there?"
I'm here."
Good. Don't hang up."
I won't. — David Sedaris

The homunculus narrator experiences everything backward - his first memory is Unverdorben's death. He has no control over Unverdorben's actions, nor access to his memories, but passively travels through life in reverse order. At first Unverdorben appears to us as a doctor, which strikes the narrator as quite a morbid occupation - patients shuffle into the emergency room, where staff suck medicines out of their bodies and rip off their bandages, sending them out into the night bleeding and screaming. But near the end of the book, we learn that Unverdorben was an assistant at Auschwitz, where he created life where none had been before - turning chemicals and electricity and corpses into living persons. Only now, thinks the narrator, does the world finally make sense. — Sean Carroll

I took my grandmother to the emergency room. The doctor said that she was on an artificial life support system, and that although her brain was dead her heart was still beating. I though, "we've never had a democrat in the family before". — Emo Philips

Without direction, the respiratory technician goes to the head of the bed. She takes the tubing, attaches it to the oxygen, and turns it on as high as it will go. She provides a seal with her hand cupped over the plastic mask, over the nose and mouth of the toddler, and methodically provides oxygenated air. Doyle's tiny chest rises and falls while I listen with my stethoscope. I am reaching for another breathing tube.
"Fib!" Dr. Pedras feels for a pulse while another places gelled pads on her chest. — Ruth McLeod-Kearns

Like many doctors, I was frankly traumatized by some of the experiences I had early on in my career. When you lean over a patient in an emergency room, trying to bring a dead body back to life, you are entirely focused on the job at hand. On the other side of a thin curtain, you can hear that person's husband or wife howling and wailing, knowing that the person they loved and lived with for fifty years is dying, begging the staff to do all they can, phoning their children, struggling to speak through tears to form the words and communicate the horror, telling them to come, quickly. I have memories from cubicles that I will never be able to deal with, and they upset me even now. — Ben Goldacre

If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room. — David Lehman

Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma. They end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs when, if you, they just gave, you gave, treatment early, and they got some treatment, and uhhh a breathalyzer, or uhh, an inhalator, not a breathalyzer ... — Barack Obama

When my dad was badly weakened by the flu and my mom wanted to call an ambulance to take him to the emergency room, he wouldn't go unless he could shave first and change into a nice shirt and a pair of slacks. — Rich Lowry

My contention is that if we expand the patient-centered health care approach, we'll have less people that have to go the medical clinic that provides free service or go to the emergency room - they can have their own health care plan. — Tim Walberg

My father used to say to me, 'Whenever you get into a jam, whenever you get into a crisis or an emergency, become the calmest person in the room and you'll be able to figure your way out of it.' — Rudy Giuliani

Most families around town only had a bottle of aspirin in their medicine cabinets. If you had the flu, you took an aspirin. If you had a toothache, you took an aspirin. If you were bitten by a snake, you took an aspirin. If you developed kidney problems from taking too much aspirin, you took an aspirin. You wouldn't even think of going to the emergency room unless your leg was hanging by a thread. And even then you might wait a while. — Marlin Bressi

Once," Balinda begins softly, "when I was in the emergency room with my mother they brought in a murderer who had been shot and was dying, right there in front of us. I watched as the nurse touched his face and reassured him and I could not believe they were being so nice to him."
"What happened?" Jill asked.
"My mother rose up, took my arm, gripped it as if she was a weight lifter and said, 'he was a beautiful baby once and his mother loved him'. — Kris Radish

Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you - seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call! — Bryant McGill

It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one. On this one: the day I returned from the emergency room after having a fit about wanting to remove my mouth. Not an easy day to look at people in their vivid clothes, in their shining hair, pointing and smiling at colorful woven sweaters.
I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be them at the same time.
At home, Joseph was nicer to me than usual and we played a silent game of Parcheesi for an hour in the slanted box of remaining sunlight on the carpet. Dad came by and brought me a pillow. Mom went to take a nap. Joseph won. I went to bed early. I woke up the same. — Aimee Bender

Italian hospitals are great. The doctor smoking in the emergency room will sign any prescription you ask for. — Derrick Williams

When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I had lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problem was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid. A lifetime of never making positive decisions, accepting instead the lesser of the evils presented to me, had atrophied my will. It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life. Emptiness, though, was not a sufficiently definite feeling to lead to a violent act. Instead of sitting in my room and balancing the relative convenience of various ways of ending it all, I ought to have been busy trying to summon up a reasonable amount of despair. Hopelessness was thinly spread like drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in. — Quentin Crisp

I know a lot of people in Washington would say, well, you know, indigent people can't manage their health savings account. They're too stupid. But they're not too stupid. Somebody has a diabetic foot ulcer, they learn very quickly not to go the emergency room where it costs five times more to take care of it. They go to the clinic. — Benjamin Carson

Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms. — Ann Brashares

You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, 'what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of beings,' a Martian would say. Don't you think so? — Anne Tyler

You invest a lot in your kids, from the sleepless nights early on and the frightening trips to the emergency room, to homework assignments and a million miles of taxi driving. The great thing is that everything you put in counts, and with a bit of luck, one day they will realize it. Love adds up to something. It's indestructible and immortal and carries long on after your own life is over. Who could ask for more? — Steve Biddulph

I found that quiet place in my home that is my place of refuge. I don't care if you got kids or if you are married. You got to find that one place that is your everybody-off-limit place: unless this place is on fire, or you need to go to the emergency room, don't disturb me. You can go to this place and cleanse, meditate, let God speak to you. — Roland Martin

Look, if you have somebody who doesn't have health insurance, who doesn't have a doctor or dentist, and in order to deal with their cold or flu or dental problem, they go to an emergency room - in general, that visit will cost ten times more than walking into a community health center. — Bernie Sanders

Every new president inherits headaches, but President Obama has inherited an entire emergency room. — Madeleine Albright

He looked like he was back outside the emergency room. When I stepped off the elevator he was visibly relieved, as if he had begun to worry that I wasn't going to show. He took both my hands in his. The features of his face had softened, as if he had put on the ten pounds that Eve had lost in the hospital. - Katey! Thanks for coming. It's good to see you. He was talking a little under his breath. It raised my antennae. — Amor Towles

I had a bike accident a few years ago, and I went to the emergency room, and I had to have a gash sewn up. And I am the kind of person that I was sitting up fascinated, watching, to the extent that the doctor said, 'Do you want to do a couple of stitches? You seem to be very interested.' — Mary Roach

It takes an average of three hours after the first symptoms of a heart attack are recognized by the patient, before that patient arrives at an emergency room. Symptoms are often denied by the patient - particularly us men, because we are very brave. — Robert Fischell

If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency-room care, we're going to have gag orders. — George W. Bush

Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject. — Carl Hiaasen

Care shouldn't start in the emergency room. — James Douglas

I've broken an arm before, but no one wanted to shoot me!' Suzie says. 'I mean, when you go to the emergency room I hope to God the doctors don't decide it might cost too much to care for.' -Suzie Schwab co-owner of East Maui Animal Refuge — Toni Polancy

When the headache persisted, I checked myself into an emergency room. When the doctor used the term 'brain tumour', I feared the worst. My whole world shrank around me. — Leander Paes

It's [a miscarriage] all very thief-in-the-night. No one really knows what to say. You go into the emergency room, you think you're going to be a mum and you walk out empty. It's all neat and tidy, there's this potential being in your life and you're empty - all cleaned up and put back together, but completely shattered. — Tori Amos

Moreover, health center services save money and lives by treating diseases before they become chronic conditions, require hospital care or require a trip to the emergency room. — Tim Murphy

At the Pentagon, for instance, in the NMCC's secure Emergency Actions room, military officials could find anyone in the Constitution's line of succession by checking the screen of a dedicated Zenith Z-150 Central Locator System computer. The CLS computers are protected by a special NSA protocol known as TEMPEST that shields them from electromagnetic snooping. II — Garrett M. Graff

Oh my God, I sent a picture of my boobs to Jim," I moaned as a fresh wave of nausea rolled through me.
"You also threw up in the emergency room parking lot, called Drew and told him you were the Donkey Punch Dick Queen and filled out a Last Will and Testament on a Burger King napkin and then asked the drive-thru worker to notarize it. — Tara Sivec

I drove myself to the Emergency Room. That's a nice relaxing drive. "Noooo, after you. Merge-everybody merge." — Brian Regan

Loose diagnosis is causing a national drug overdose of medication. Six percent of our people are addicted to prescription drugs, and there are now more emergency room visits and deaths due to legal prescription drugs than to illegal street drugs.6 — Allen Frances

People have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room. — George W. Bush

I was in the emergency room twice with heart palpitations and panic attacks. As one of my actor friends pointed out: your body doesn't know that you're making art. You think about struggle and challenge and you imagine yourself weighing 302 pounds and being restricted and in despair. Your body doesn't know that that's not the case. — Lori Lansens

He was breathing, which is always a good sign.
As gently as I could I picked him up, placed him on the towel, wrapped it around him, and put him in my car. I drove to the emergency clinic, the cat purring on the seat beside me.
"What's his name?" the young man at the front desk asked as my towel and cat were whisked to a back room.
"Uh ... John Tomkins," I said.
"That's different," the receptionist said, writing it down.
"He was a pirate," I said. "I mean Tomkins. I don't know about the cat. — Josh Lanyon

To my mind, every emergency room should have a low-intensity laser for people with stroke or head trauma. This therapy would be especially important for head injuries, because there is no effective drug therapy for traumatic brain injury. Uri Oron has also shown that low-intensity laser light can reduce scar formation in animals that have had heart attacks; perhaps lasers should be used in emergency rooms for cardiac — Norman Doidge

Not to sound, you know, like a dick," Jack said carefully. "But you just dragged us out of bed to show us Jane's messy room? That's not really an emergency Mae."
"She's not here!" Mae shouted, gesturing to the mess around her. "That's the emergency."
"Again, not to be a dick, but that's not really an emergency." Jack said. — Amanda Hocking

There were other stories and other names. Second Base Stace, who had breasts in fourth grade and let some of the boys feel them. Vincent, who took acid and tried to flush a sofa down the toilet. Sheila, who allegedly masturbated with a hot dog and had to go to the emergency room. The list went on and on. — Stephen Chbosky

I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. ( ... ) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette. — Janet Fitch

If I were a poet, that's what I'd write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, "How's it going, how's the kids?" They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare. — Janet Fitch

Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama ... you may be running from yourself. — Ellen Bass

Remember the time Pamela stuffed a bead up her nose and we had to take her to the emergency room to get it out? That bead cost us a fortune. — Debbie Macomber

Each generation has been an education for us in different ways. The first child-with-bloody-nose was rushed to the emergency room. The fifth child-with-bloody-nose was told to go to the yard immediately and stop bleeding on the carpet. — Art Linkletter

I'd love to be a dead body in the emergency room and have George Clooney go, 'This one's gone!' while he puts a sheet on me. — Rosie O'Donnell

Do you want to have to tell the doctor at the emergency room that the reason your wound opened up was because you couldn't keep your you know what in your pants." "First of all, I don't think I'd have to say you know what in front of the doctor. — Mary J. Williams

I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.
— Janet Fitch

Borderline means you're one of those girls ...
... who walk around wearing long sleeves in the summer because you've carved up your forearms over your boyfriend. You make pathetic suicidal gestures and write bad poetry about them, listen to Ani DiFranco albums on endless repeat, end up in the emergency room for overdoses, scare off boyfriends by insisting they tell you that they love you five hundred times a day and hacking into their email to make sure they're not lying, have a police record for shoplifting, and your tooth enamel is eroded from purging. You've had five addresses and eight jobs in three years, your friends are avoiding your phone calls, you're questioning your sexuality, and the credit card companies are after you. It took a lot of years to admit that I was exactly that girl, and that the diagnostic criteria for the disorder were essentially an outline of my life. — Stacy Pershall

I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be an inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I'll make the journey first, then depart. — David Foster Wallace

HERSHEY HIGH AS BODY

The classroom bell like a slow heartbeat
pumps students through the hallways of your veins.
Your cafeteria growls and your doors close
like eyelids at night when you sleep.
What do you dream about, high school?
Do you dream that you are a hospital,
keeping us alive with your textbooks-heart monitors,
your basketball court, an emergency room?
When I fall down in the hallway,
my books spraying over the floor like vomit,
you wish you could pull your motor arms
out of the earth and pick me up.
But you can't help me. No one can. — Karen Finneyfrock

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.[21] While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse.[22] The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both.[23] In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories.[24] Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.[25] — Judith Lewis Herman

There's only a couple times when fame is ever helpful. Sometimes you can get into a restaurant where the kitchen is just closing. Sometimes you can avoid a traffic violation. But the only time it really matters is in the emergency room with your kids. That's when you want to be noticed, because it's very easy to get forgotten in an ER. — Bill Murray

If, in fact, the GOP doesn't like any form of health care reform, what do we do with those 40 to 60 million uninsured? ... When they show up in the emergency room, just shoot 'em! Kill them! ... Do we have enough body bags? I don't know. — Montel Williams

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication. — Anne Lamott

Scarlett doesn't want to go to the hospital. Not surprising, really, since we have to come up with an elaborate story about how we all got so severely wounded.
"Dogfight. We broke one up," my sister answers for us as a horrified emergency room receptionist looks at Scarlett's raw, bleeding shoulders.
"Dogs dislike us." Silas shrugs, clutching the wound on his chest. He glances down at the burn wounds on my legs. I think they might scar, but it's hard to say. The receptionist speaks into a walkie-talkie, then lets her eyes travel from the fresh wounds to the ancient scars on Scarlett's body.
"Dogs pretty much hate me," Scarlett says testily. The poor receptionist looks relieved when the ER doctors appear and usher us down the hall. — Jackson Pearce

People usually focus on what burglars take, but it's how they move that's so consistently interesting. Burglars explore. They might not live in a city full of secret passages and trapdoors - but they make it look as if they do. They have their own tools and floor plans, their own ways to get from A to B. They'll curl up inside refrigerators, climb through ceilings, use garbage chutes and fall twenty-one floors straight into the emergency room when they could simply have taken the stairs. They'll slip through porch screens and stow themselves inside clothes dryers till the police come busting in to find them. — Geoff Manaugh

The last thing you want to do is play a long gig on a hot night, pass out, and wind up in a hospital emergency room. — Bun E. Carlos

20 years, we have experienced three unanticipated fads partly precipitated by DSM-IV: a 20-fold increase in Autism Spectrum Disorder,7 a tripling of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),8 and a doubling of Bipolar Disorders.9 The most dangerous fad is a 40-fold increase in childhood Bipolar Disorders,10 stimulated, not by DSM-IV, but instead by reckless and misleading drug company marketing. Twenty percent of the U.S. population11 is taking a psychotropic drug; 7% is addicted to one; and overdoses with legal drugs now cause more emergency room visits than overdoses with illegal drugs. — Allen Frances