After working more than 800 hours at Ground Zero, New York City Police Department Emergency Service Unit Detective Glen Klein began a struggle with drinking and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I had taken it pretty rough, though. I had started drinking pretty heavily. Yeah, it got pretty bad for a while. I couldn’t really deal too well with the fact of losing all my friends and the fact that our country was attacked. It hit home. I became—I don’t want to say an alcoholic because it wasn’t like I had to get up in the morning and had to have a drink, but through the course of the day I would drink a bottle of wine and then open up another bottle of wine, wind up finishing two bottles of wine. That went on for well over a year. It got to the point where I was having blackouts.
I guess I was holding everything in. I wasn’t going for any help. I didn’t really realize that I needed any help. My family told me that I wasn’t myself. My kids were calling me an alcoholic, which is something that really, really hurt me bad. And it was enough to make me realize that I needed help. It was after 9/11 was completely finished. It was probably closer to 2003 that I started going for help. I was able to stop the drinking totally, and I straightened myself out as much as I could. I mean, I’m still going for counseling to this day, but things are a lot better now than they were.”
Retired NYPD Detective Glenn Klein was a highly decorated Emergency Service Unit first responder on 9/11. He suffers from chronic gastro-intestinal disorders and asthma. Glenn is now Director of Police Affairs for the Fealgood Foundation and worked tirelessly to help get the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act passed by Congress. Centereach, NY, February 24, 2011.
“All of us were choking at one point – I remember getting our eyes flushed out several times during the day. My eyes looked like they were bleeding. We never really thought about long term effects. We got respirators but we found out they were the wrong respirators, and an EPA technician told us the air was fine.”
