EP 109: Designing Harm Reduction | Kimberly Sue
On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing harm reduction.
Dr. Kimberly Sue is an Assistant Professor of Medicine with the Program in Addiction Medicine (Division of General Internal Medicine) at Yale University School of Medicine. She is the former Medical Director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition, New York, NY, which strives to improve the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs. Currently, she serves as an Attending Physician at the Central Medical Unit, APT Foundation, which provides primary care to patients receiving methadone and other substance use treatment services and supervises fellows and trainees within the Yale Addiction Medicine Fellowship program. She also is an Attending Physician on the hospital-based Yale Addiction Medicine Consult Service. She holds board certification in both Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine. Dr. Sue trained at Harvard's MD-PhD Social Science Program, and has a PhD in sociocultural anthropology. Her book, Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis (2019), is based on her research on women with opioid use disorder in Massachusetts prison and jails. Her current research interests include harm reduction, stigma, gender/women and substance use, and overdose response strategies on local, state, and federal levels.
Episode mentions and links:
Kim's Book: Getting Wrecked Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis
NEXT Distro (mail based harm reduction service)
Restaurant Kim would take you to: Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana (or Sally’s or Modern or any one of the many highly revered New Haven Pizza joints)
Follow Kim: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn
Episode Reflection
If you enjoyed this week’s episode with Dr. Kim Sue, you may also want to check out episode 2 of Design Lab with Dr. Nzinga Harrison, for another excellent perspective on destigmatizing addiction and harm reduction.
This week, a particular statement from Dr. Sue gave me pause.
“We incarcerate people in the US for doing drugs. We say it's illegal. We say it's criminal. We say you're wrong, it's immoral, it's bad, and you deserve to be punished. So, the health-based approach would say, let me treat you. Let me work on your poverty. Let me work on your human rights. Let me work on [your] conditions, your trauma.”
To be entirely honest, every time I hear statements like this, it still surprises the hell out of me. It surprises me that this is how we as a society choose to deal with this illness and that people like Kim have to spend so much time and effort fighting to change a system that prefers to label people as inhuman than deal with the complexity of the human condition head-on. I suppose I should feel privileged to be surprised. I’ve met many people who have no illusions of a reality where they are not seen as less-than, as criminals, and as “bad people” because of their illness.
I can’t help but imagine, what if we treated other diseases in the way we treat people with substance use disorder? What if the insulin that I am entirely dependent on was criminalized? If I couldn’t just pick insulin up at my local pharmacy, what lengths would I go to to stay alive? What if simply injecting insulin into my body, was enough to get me arrested and jailed? What if, despite being treatable, my disease led to my early death because the system decided that my disease is different and my life wasn’t worth the same as others? I know it seems preposterous to jail people with diabetes for using insulin, but why are we OK with this approach in people who battle addiction?
I know that harm reduction strategies remain a controversial topic. Even my comparing substance use disorder to diabetes is likely to rile a few emotional responses. But this is something we need to be talking about. I’d posit that everyone reading this has been personally touched by this disease in some way, and many of us, have experienced tragedy at the hands of this pandemic firsthand. Progress is happening, albeit far too slow for many who need urgent help. But thanks to people like Dr. Kim and a new generation of compassionate, human-centered providers being trained today, I’m hopeful that someday soon criminalizing any disease will be truly preposterous.
Written by Rob Pugliese
-
Bon Ku: On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing harm reduction. I'm Bon Ku the host of Design Lab, a podcast that explores the intersection of design and health. Today's guest is Dr. Kimberly Sue, she is an assistant professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. Formerly she was the medical director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition in New York City. It's an organization that strives to improve the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs. Currently, she serves as an attending physician, providing primary care to patients receiving methadone and other substance use treatment services. And she supervises fellows and trainees with the Yale Addiction Medicine Fellowship Program.
Kim is board certified, both in internal medicine and addiction medicine. She trained at Harvard MD-PhD social science program and has a PhD in social cultural anthropology. In addition to having a medical degree.
Kim has a book called Getting Wrecked: Women Incarceration and the American Opiod Crisis that was published in 2019.
It's based upon her research on women with opioid use disorder in Massachusetts prisons and jails.
Support the Design Lab Podcast. You can do this in three ways. You can follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Give us five stars and leave us a review. And go to our website designlabpod.com. There you can find show notes from each week. Learn more about the guests and get related content from each episode. And there's a link to sign up for our amazing newsletter. I get show notes and links right into your email inbox every week. Our producer, Rob Pugliese gives his reflections on each podcast. They're awesome. You'll be reminded each week when a new episode drops.
Now here's my conversation with Dr. Kimberly Sue
Interview
Bon Ku: Dr. Kim Sue, welcome to Design Lab. I am thrilled to have you on the,
Kimberly Sue: Thank you so much for having me.
Bon Ku: You are a double doctor.
Not only are you a physician, but you also have a PhD in anthropology and I, I was curious to know how this impacts a type of physician that you are.
Kimberly Sue: Yes, it is really unique. Uh, there are tens, maybe a hundred of us out there or more.
Bon Ku: Wow.
Kimberly Sue: It's a very long training path, but. I was always interested in not just medicine, diagnosis, treatment, but the conditions under which wellness or suffering sort of emerged. And anthropology is a way to think about that.
Think about cultures, think about different ways that people think about the body. Think about, you know, different traditions, where you grow up and what your access to resources are and what you've seen in your family influences your health and wellbeing and you know, how people think about food or how think people think even holistically about spirituality and how all those things impact wellbeing, not even just health, but just your ability to thrive. And I was always fascinated by this, cuz I grew up in a lot of different parts of the country and I felt like I was always an outsider looking in. And that's sort of how anthropology as a discipline exists. And so when I got to college, Like, wow, you could like study this.
This is incredible. And I was just fascinated and, and really thus did a PhD.
Bon Ku: Yeah, I always felt like an outsider looking into, cause my family moved around a lot. By the time I was in the ninth grade. It was like my ninth different school. So I was always a new kid. So I should have became an anthropologist too.
Kimberly Sue: you shoulda, I think you should have. It's, it's really a, a wonderful literature of thinking about difference a and as well as similarity.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Kimberly Sue: And why, why things are the way they are. And I had been thinking about those things for a long time.
Bon Ku: Now, did you go to medical school first and then do your PhD in anthropology or was it like intertwine?
Kimberly Sue: It was intertwined on purpose. I, it was part of the Harvard, social science MD PhD program. So I did three years of medical school and then a PhD in the middle. And I finished one more year of medical school at the end, and that was actually done on purpose so that I could think a little bit about the culture of medicine.
The exposure to the third year of medical school, which some of your listeners may know, is very intense. Where you, your first time in the hospital, you're wide-eyed, you're doing all these different rotations, you've never, been in a hospital or a clinic before. And so I really did wanna understand how that can be its own culture, with its own language, with its own conventions, and then go off and do my PhD so I could think about those ideas, having had those experiences.
Bon Ku: Hmm. And where in the journey did you decide to enter into the field of addiction medicine? And for those listeners who don't know what that is, what is addiction medicine?
Kimberly Sue: Yeah, I think I started to think about addiction very early, but never really considered it a viable specialty, so to speak, until late much later in life. I had spent a lot of time in college with H I V activists and really at the knee of people in ACT Up at the knee of people in Health Gap, which is another nonprofit that works for global health justice.
In doing that was working with a lot of people who'd experienced incarceration as well as people who had substance use and substance use issues. And I began to think about my own privilege as well as think about these complex, gnarly problems and so, I realized when I got much, you know, later into medical school, definitely through my PhD that, addiction medicine, which is this field where you take care of people with, substance use disorders, where you work on preventing it harm reduction treatment and providing people holistic care and achieving their own goals in terms of their substance use, ensuring it's not problematic, it's not having disturbances in their lives or their relationships.
And I realized that I loved it because every single person in their relationship to their substances is different. You have to really understand where they come from, their biography. Their genetic makeup, how they were raised, why they do what they do. And it's sort of like everyone, I don't wanna use the word like snowflake, but everyone is unique and everyone's story was fascinating.
And it's not really just about the medicines, it's really about understanding everyone's story, which is so different. And I could sit with someone and talk with them for an hour or two hours, and it's different every time.
Bon Ku: Mm. And I could see how you're training it as an anthropologist. It just was a perfect fit for it. Right.
Kimberly Sue: It's a perfect fit. It's a perfect fit. And I think one thing that people like about working with me as a doctor or as a researcher, an anthropologist or an advocate, is that systems level thinking, but also the microcosm and being able to toggle in and out between someone's lived experience of their world, as well as how does this affect public policy for all, everyone or across the globe, and how do we toggle in and out, and having that lens, the anthropological lens and theories and frameworks, allows me to think about structural violence, social suffering, and as well as take care of people.
Bon Ku: Let's talk about how the system needs to Uh, redesign to. Meet the needs of people with substance use disorder. You are the medical director of a great organization called National Harm Reduction Coalition, and what is harm reduction strategy?
Kimberly Sue: That's my favorite topic. I'm no longer at a harm reduction coalition, national Harm Reduction Coalition, but I love it and I will, I will tell you all about it. So, harm reduction is a philosophy as well as a practice that was really developed in the eighties and nineties by people who use drugs, people who do sex work in collaboration with people in the community and public health and medicine.
Bon Ku: Mm.
Kimberly Sue: that basically says that abstinence is not required of people at all, nor should it be the condition under which we strive for. And really to respect the dignity and wellbeing of people who use drugs. Taking a compassionate, person-centered approach where we work with people to eliminate the harms that they have of their substance use and understand why they use and even the benefits that they may derive from substance use. So harm reduction is really a key to a more compassionate drug policy and a safer and better world for people who use drugs, which is so many of us.
Bon Ku: Yeah. So this is not part of the War on Drugs
Kimberly Sue: This is an antidote to the war on drugs. So this is the balm, the war on drugs many people have, said as a failure. There was recently a trial where everyone was like, I don't believe in the war on drugs. You know, they couldn't get jurors on on because basically people were so disillusioned by the quote unquote war on drugs that we've had in the US at least for 50 years. And we've imported all over the world like the Philippines, many places, Russia, you know, many
Bon Ku: Really? So we've been exporting
Kimberly Sue: Mm-hmm.
Bon Ku: terrible policy across the world.
Kimberly Sue: A terrible policy where people are killed for using methamphetamine, where people are, you know, imprisoned, incarcerated, or killed for, you know, using substances, really has been a part of, like our, US colonialist legacy.
Bon Ku: And if anyone knows. Why these policies do not work, why they're not a good public health strategy. You do, you wrote a book called Getting Wrecked that came out in 2019 where you followed women battling addiction as they went into the prison system in Massachusetts right.
Kimberly Sue: Right. So I followed women with substance use disorders, as they went into prison or jail, particularly with opioid use, which we can talk about is a, you know, one of our huge,crises of public health, in this country, especially with fentanyl currently. And, we have over 108,000 deaths in the last 12 months, COVID has, it's only gotten worse and worse.
Bon Ku: It's got, yeah, it got worse in Covid. It was,
Kimberly Sue: much.
Bon Ku: yeah, I mean, this data has shown that, but my own personal experience working in the Philadelphia emergency room, I've seen it gotten worse.
Kimberly Sue: Much worse. Much worse. And, and so I, I was very interested in this question of we incarcerate people in the US for doing drugs. We say it's illegal. We say it's criminal. We say you're wrong, it's immoral, it's bad, and you deserve to be punished. So, the health-based approach would say, let me treat you. Let me work on your poverty.
Let me work on your human rights. Let me work on the conditions, your trauma. Let me work on the things you know, without sending you to prison or jail, which is very expensive and has a lot of collateral consequences. You can't live in public housing. You can't get. Da da da, you, you know, after you get out, you know, there's so many complications of, the mark of a criminal record.
And so I followed people in and out and I also compared it to people who just, got treatment in the community. And really, I explore how prisons and jails really further traumatized people and actually put people out in a position that's often worse than they began. Really claiming to do treatment, but, using abstinence based only policies, using policies that are really, punitive and, don't actually help the conditions under which people live when they're released.
You know? And they say, okay, I'm gonna try to keep you away from drugs in this place. And we know drugs get into prisons and jails all the time because people are dying of overdoses inside all the time. So they're not even effective at actually keeping drugs out of these places. In fact, they cause a lot of harm and then they say, you know, You know, they don't actually change where you live, what's your, you know, your ability, your relationship to your family, all of the things like that people should be able to access in their own communities where they live and rather than, go 200 miles away to a facility that that doesn't actually meet their needs.
Bon Ku: How did you collect these stories? What was that process like, and how did you establish trust with the women?
Kimberly Sue: Yeah, so , it took a long time. You know, working with people who are incarcerated has special federal protections. I specifically went into Massachusetts, women's prison at Framingham, and one of in the Boston Jail, which is known as, Suffolk House of Corrections.
And you just have to really, lay bare what you're interested in And continue to interview, get life histories, also meet people where they're at. I would, you know, drive to wherever they were. I would meet them on their, on their own terms, in their own spaces. I wouldn't ask them to come, meet me in the research office.
And also I would advocate for them. I was not like a passive researcher. I showed up one day with one of the people in the book whose name is Lydia. And by very fact of me showing up at court, they decided not to violate her probation and parole that day only because I was there and I was a Harvard affiliated researcher and medical student, and they were like, Lydia, we would've violated you to go to prison immediately.
You've not shown up to court the last three times but because you have this, you know, doctor or person type here, we're gonna let you go today. And so I advocated, I, I printed out her records from the hospital. She had been hospitalized for necrotizing fasciitis and advocated for that
Bon Ku: is a terrible disease. I mean, it's literally like a flush eating disease that you could die. Yeah.
Kimberly Sue: Yeah, she had nine or 10 skin grafts, related to the necrotizing fasciitis and was in a lot of pain. Terrible wound care, was discharged homeless, was using chaotically heroin chaotically. When I met up with her just to try to sort of manage the pain she had given, been giving maybe like six tabs of hydromorphone and her tolerance is very high, and she blew through that in like a day and was just using to try to treat the pain and manage the wounds.
Bon Ku: The amount of deaths that we see from opioid use disorder and other substance use disorders. We're probably the worst on the planet, right? the US in terms of all of the, the deaths and harm caused by our policies and how do we get into this mess? And are there other countries that do it better than us in terms of their policies that stand out in your mind?
Kimberly Sue: Yeah, I would say that we got into this mess because this country has a very puritanical origin. Substance use has always been associated with being wrong, being morally corrupt, being bad. Historically, women have particularly had higher to fall than male counterparts.
They were punished for double the period of time. if a man might go to prison for a year, women would go for two or four years for the same thing like drinking. So, we've had this very puritanical origin story that is very, two-faced in, in many hypocritical because we all are using some kind of substance to feel better, to get productivity, to get sleep, to ease pain.
These are all the human condition. We've grown substances to achieve intoxication as long as the human, society has existed. We've always found ways to get intoxicated, get wasted. You know, our many people probably died trying many substances and plants and smoking things and taking, Taking, you know, the, the different kinds of ways that we use substances to achieve spirituality, to get, sleep, rest, pain, all of these things are very part of the human condition. And yet we have criminalized them in the US and we criminalize certain substances and not others.
And arguably one might say that alcohol,leads to one of the most prevalent harms our society faces, right?
Bon Ku: A hundred, a hundred percent. I see it every time I work in, in the emergency room where no one gets like high and goes and gets a gun or a knife and stabs or shoots someone, right? But when I see someone getting shot or stabbed, alcohol is almost always involved.
Kimberly Sue: Always. And you could arguably make an argument that alcohol's harms on individual organ systems. I could point to alcohol related dementia, alcohol gastritis, alcohol neuropathy, cirrhosis, you know, every organ system a can increase rates of, you know, esophageal and stomach cancers. Colon can, you can point to so many organ systems that are poisoned by alcohol for example, a licit substance. And I'm not necessarily saying that we should criminalize alcohol, but I'm saying that other countries regulate and standardize substances. Other countries don't incarcerate people for using, substances and take a public health and health-based approach.
And the most famous example of that is Portugal. Which, in the early two thousands decided they were gonna take a harm reduction approach, that they weren't gonna criminalize substance use. People who use, substances that are problematic, which many people use substances that are not patic.
That's, that's most people, you know, use substances that don't register, either on medical or, you know, legal, legal areas. And for those people that did, they would go in front of a committee. I mean, they would have options To get treatment, to get, services, to increase help and assistance and really resorting very infrequently to incarceration.
Bon Ku: And that's worked in Portugal.
Kimberly Sue: I mean, it, it has worked in Portugal and I think it's also, increasing access to what their people need and, and what people who use drugs say they need and do need. And, we are innovating in the laboratories of democracy here in the US. So Oregon, for example, is they have measure 110 which was on the ballot, which allowed them to decriminalize some substance use. And instead, put a lot of that money into treatment, into harm reduction, into housing, and a lot of the things that people said that they needed, not incarceration. So that is, actually having a dramatic effect. It's even decreasing the rates of, you know, young black men who get arrested for marijuana or cannabis, which is like really incredible because those very racist, structurally harmful systems.
Bon Ku: How do we de-stigmatize substance use disorder? I mean, even working in the hospital,
Kimberly Sue: Mm-hmm.
Bon Ku: there is a frustration that I see among healthcare staff. You know, we call these patients addicts and we get frustrated because of, a lot of times they'll leave against medical advice when we're trying to admit them for iV antibiotics should treat their cellulitis and they cycle in and out of the system. And, I see, stigmatizing this population.
Kimberly Sue: Yes, so you are a hundred percent right. I think that there is a strong need to mo we, we say move away from like the, a words addict, abuse, abuser, alcoholic, words that are dehumanizing person, I use people who use drugs I, you know, and, language matters.
We know there's a study where people use the word abuse in the charts of master students. And they, at the end, of the chart, they'd say, oh, this person deserves to be punished, not treated. So we know that the chart lore matters. So that's an easy thing, like off the fir, off the bat, like the language needs to be, neutral and clinically appropriate.
Substance abuse is not in the DSM, substance abuse disorder, polysubstance abuse. That's not a thing. PSA when someone consults me for that, I'm like, that to me says prostate specific antigen. Like that is not an entity.
Bon Ku: and you're not just trying to be PC
Kimberly Sue: I'm not trying to be pedantic or PC cuz it really matters, you know?
And I work with so . Many people who use drugs who are like, I got called a dirty junkie. I got called an addict. I got called these saying I'm gonna rather die than go back to you.
Bon Ku: Wow.
Kimberly Sue: Like, you know, I'd rather die of this necrotizing fascitis I'd rather die of this abscess in this than go to you. we actually very much embody cops in the hospital.
We police our patients. You know, many people on our team, including ourselves, often, everyone and our team sort of has this, inner cop where we're like, yo, you lied to me. I would lie to you too if like you weren't gonna give me medication. And so I think treating pain aggressively is one thing.
I think understanding the trauma that people who use drugs report in going the hospital. I've had patients where we have to orchestrate this exact specific thing where I'm on call. I will come down to the ED I will be there, I will receive them. I will mediate with the ED attending. I will do everything I can to try to get them up to a bed and, but you can't control like, all that stigma from everyone or you can't, you know, I can't ameliorate every single look at the guard or the front desk or so-and-so does, or the way that they got, needle, you know, 50 times cuz they couldn't get a line or all these other things.
Right. So it's very, very hard for me to convince people to come in when they could be dying and need emergency care. They need hospital level care and it goes very badly.
So I do think like showing stories of how people recover, I think is really important in telling. And I bring patients to grand rounds and stuff.
Bon Ku: You
do? Oh, that's so cool.
Kimberly Sue: And really brought, I brought a patient who I met, who was homeless in the needle exchange in the Bronx, and she was sleeping on the 4, 5, 6 line. And, you know, she, we started her on buprenorphine. She got housing, you know, she really like, was able to go visit her family and make a, it was like incredible, right?
So people need to hear that. People do, get better.
Bon Ku: Mm.
Kimberly Sue: and that, you know, they're worthy. And so we, we, as a society need, we need some of that goodness because we see so much, of harms and we can be very jaded.
Bon Ku: I mean there is this importance of storytelling in medicine to share, some of these stories of these patients who aren't like, the typical cases that we normally see, and that there is some hope. Cause I think a lot of healthcare staff get frustrated and they don't see, a way out.
Kimberly Sue: Pull over and I got out and I like took a picture with
Bon Ku: Oh, I think I saw that on, it was on Instagram, right? Yeah.
Kimberly Sue: I'm like, I love it when we like show that people recover. There was like a really good ad in New York City, with methadone and buprenorphine, where they're like, methadone saved my life. Buprenorphine saved my life.
Like I have a job now. I like able to, you know, not be thinking about getting fentanyl, heroin every four hours and I can just chill and, you know, so I love those.
Bon Ku: Can, you explain what Buprenorphine is for those who do not know who's listening?
Kimberly Sue: Yeah, Buprenorphine and methadone are medications that are highly effective for treating opioid use disorder. And,they are opioid agonist therapy or, OAT sometimes we call it. And they, they're long-acting op opioids, a methadone's, a full agonist, and buprenorphine's, a partial agonist.
And really they decrease your chance of overdose and death by half. I mean, they are, hugely effective, substances that are much stigmatized. But with the long halflife people stop, needing to use as much throughout the day. So with fentanyl and heroin, people might be using, two to, you know, upwards of 10 times a day.
Constantly cycles of withdrawal. that our brain is, and our bodies go through and, and seeking the drug out. And buprenorphine and methadone level off, those feelings and treat the cravings and, and people do really well.
Bon Ku: I imagine this work of addiction medicine can be challenging at times and sets you up to be criticized or there's hurdles. Can you talk about some of those challenges?
Kimberly Sue: Yeah, , it's a hot button issue now. I think, there is a lot of education that we need in healthcare, but also in society generally. I think people agree that it's a common good but I do get a lot of criticism about, you know, the medications that we use.
I think we get a lot of criticism about our approaches. We get told that people should hit quote unquote rock bottom. We get told that people should go to jail, that people should a rott in jail, that people deserve what they've done to themselves, that people don't deserve to be given naloxone over and over.
Kimberly Sue: That people, you know, we get told all
of these things, so we're constantly,
Bon Ku: How does that not get you so angry all the
Kimberly Sue: I'm very angry. I'm very.
Bon Ku: you seem so calm, man. Collective.
Kimberly Sue: you know, it's a lot of yoga. I mean, it's a lot of meditation. , you know, it is, it is like a cisiphean task really. I mean, we are up against a lot of forces that not only like don't care, but are actually, you know, quite, quite harmful.
So I do really try to put out good energy, you know, and the energy that people, you can do it. There's a lot of cheerleading that needs to go on for patients. For ourselves, like addiction medicine, we see a lot of trauma. We deal with people dying in their twenties, thirties, forties.
That is highly abnormal. That is tragic. my mentor Paul Farmer, would call these like stupid deaths, you know, like deaths of poverty. every overdose death we say is preventable.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Kimberly Sue: and really we have this Lazarus medication Naloxone that literally, you've given it many
times, I'm sure Philadelphia in the emergency room, it literally brings people back from the dead.
You know, they are not breathing enough. They're not breathing at all, and we have this medication. If people had access to it, if people had access to community and to people that could give it to them and an ample supply of what they need or medication, no one should die of an overdose.
Bon Ku: Yeah. We were talking before we started recording about your family background. They've been here multi-generations, but you are Chinese American, and I'm curious to know what are their thoughts of you being an addiction medicine specialist that surprised them and did it go, why are you getting an MD PhD?
Kimberly Sue: Yes. Yeah. I am a, a multiple generation Chinese American and, really have, you know, it's been hard to explain, to my family why I've been interested in harm reduction in being an addiction medicine doctor. at a certain point, I sat down with my mom and I just told her, I was like, this is what fascinates me and I don't care at all about the heart.
You know, I don't care at all about going into these prestigious specialties.
Bon Ku: have been. You should have been a cardiologist,
Kimberly Sue: you and I was like, look, I went to Harvard is not good enough for you . So, know, I, but you, at certain point I was like captain of my own ship, you know, and I was, I went to South Africa to do research on H I V and, and reproductive healthcare and, you know, I just was told them, I'm like, this is what I'm gonna do with my life.
And it's my calling and I need to do it. And I hope you respect, my decisions and I hope you see that I'll be able to make a, a living and a path for myself. And it was really funny because my mom, my mom was talking to her old childhood friend who lives in San Francisco and that person got a.
Got a new primary care doctor and she's like, oh, that her new primary care doctor also said she did addiction. And she said, does she know you? And she said, oh, she knows you. You're famous or something. You know, like, I dunno. It's, I think now that she's at a place, my, my parents are at and my family are at a place of like understanding, they understand that.
There's not enough people doing this work and that it is my calling and it is me and, and the way they've raised me. that also allowed me to step into this space.
Bon Ku: That's so cool. one question that I love to ask or guess is if there was a listener to come visit you, where would you take them out to eat?
Kimberly Sue: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . So if you come to New Haven, I don't currently live anymore, but New Haven is where I work at, at Yale and New Haven is famous for pizza. So every time I'm on service, on the addiction consult service, I'll buy the team a different kind of New Haven Pizza. And you know, there's a whole formula about the water and the crust.
And how much char and it's really, really flavorful dough compared to New York pizza where I went to school in New York. You know, so I'm very biased towards New York style, you know, thin cross, like, you know, pizzas, New Haven has a much chewier, tastier, arguably crust and dough and it, gets a little charred.
And so there's, a huge camp. There's camps. There's Pepe's based camps, there's
Bon Ku: is.
Kimberly Sue: there's Modern, and there's many other, you know, subsets of those. And, they, they are particularly famous for like a tomato pizza or a clam
Bon Ku: Clam. I've had that clam pizza. So good. Do you have a favorite
Kimberly Sue: There's also a mashed potato pizza at Bar.
There's a mashed potato pizza at Bar with bacon and mashed potatoes. That's really good. So every time I'm eating I'm like, it's a fresh experience. I'm like, oh, clams and Pepe's there's actually like a gorganzola pizza Pepe's that's really good. Sally's has a really good tomato pizza.
I'm like, I don't have no favorite, but every time I'm on service, the team wants something different and I'm like, okay. And then like it's a fresh, new experience but I, I actually am a huge convert of New Haven Pizza. I would take New Haven Pizza over a New York Pizza, like
Bon Ku: that's saying a lot.
Kimberly Sue: Yeah. Given like the choice, you know, of your average sort of pizza. Yeah.
It's much more flavorful. Definitely. Your listeners, if they're in New Haven, should try it.
Bon Ku: All right, cool. We'll put a link to, those restaurants, and if people want to support and help out h how can they do that? What's the best way?
Kimberly Sue: I would say there's a couple ways. One is look up and see if you have syringe service program or a needle exchange in your area and see if they need volunteering, see if they need supplies, see if they need people to stock kits, see if there's any services that you could give them. and supporting even there's one that ships via mail called nextdistro.org, and so if you don't have one, they can ship it to you and You can support them. You can check out all the stuff on Harm Reduction Coalition's website. You could donate to the overdose prevention centers. We have two above ground ones in New York City that are at risk of losing state and federal funding called On Point.
So there's so many ways that you can be involved. You know, trading services, mutual aid, building community, donating. All of those things are are wonderful.
Bon Ku: Awesome. And we'll put a link to all those sites in the show notes and.
Outro Music
Bon Ku: I have a thousand more questions, but I wanna be sensitive to your time. I know you're extremely busy, but thank you so much, Kim, for coming on the show, for teaching me for your advocacy. I'm such a huge fan.
Kimberly Sue: Thank you so much for having me.
Bon Ku: Follow Dr. Kimberly Sue on Twitter and Instagram. Her handle is D R K I M S U E. And reach out to me on Twitter at B O N K U on Instagram at D R B O N K U. Design Lab is produced by Rob Pugliese editing by Fernando Queiroz. Our theme music was created by Emmanuel Houston and the cover design by Eden Lew. See you next week.
