George Floyd's girlfriend shared his opioids pain – Derek Chauvin refused to see it

Of all the accounts of George Floyd’s life and death heard in a Minneapolis courtroom this week, perhaps the least expected was his girlfriend’s description of their shared struggle with opioid addiction.

Courteney Ross’s wrenching testimony gave a very human glimpse into the remorseless search for a fix and a mutual fight to shake off drug dependency.

It was a story that would be recognised by millions of Americans sucked into the greatest drug epidemic in their country’s history by the pharmaceutical industry’s drive to flood the US with opioid painkillers.

Related: Derek Chauvin trial: what we've learned after the first week

The defence lawyer for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer on trial for murder, saw something in Ross’s account too. An opportunity.

Ross told of her boyfriend’s brush with death from an overdose just weeks before he drew his last breath under Chauvin’s knee in May last year. He took a pill she didn’t recognise. “His stomach really hurt,” she said. “He was doubled over in pain.”

Ross said she noticed a white substance around Floyd’s mouth and got him to hospital, where he stayed for several days after apparently overdosing. It wasn’t the first time.

Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, drew attention to the similarity between Ross’s description and the police account of Floyd’s condition as they arrested him: a man complaining that his stomach hurt and with white foam around his mouth.

Nelson’s intent was to undercut the prosecution claim that Chauvin killed Floyd by keeping his knee on his neck for more than nine minutes as Floyd lay on the ground.

The defence has made a simple calculation. Sow doubt in just one juror about the cause of death – after all the official autopsy showed Floyd had a mix of drugs in his system – and Chauvin could walk free.

But if the defence claim is that Floyd was evidently overdosing, or at least under the influence of drugs, why did Chauvin and his fellow officers not act on that at the time?

From video shown in court, it’s clear Floyd was in distress even before Chauvin put his knee on his neck. He was rambling and confused when officers arrived at the scene. The cashier who sold Floyd cigarettes shortly before his arrest told the trial he was evidently high, although friendly and not threatening.

Even if the police did not immediately recognise that Floyd was under the influence of drugs or at risk of overdosing, it is clear he was having some kind of crisis, perhaps with his mental health.

Chauvin and his fellow officers heard Floyd repeatedly cry out about stomach pain and saw foam around his mouth. Yet his cries for help were dismissed. There appeared to be an indifference to his welfare. Chauvin told his supervisor only that Floyd was “going crazy”.

Why did the police not recognise that the man in their custody was in crisis? Was it because the officers did not want to see? Or because they weren’t trained to? Either way, those few minutes might have had a far less tragic outcome had they treated Floyd as a medical emergency.

The paramedic who treated Floyd said that when he arrived, none of the police officers was offering the dying man any kind of first aid, even though he wasn’t breathing. Throughout, Floyd remained only a suspect who had to be subdued.

One reform demanded by protesters in the wake of Floyd’s death is for a chunk of police budgets to be spent on putting social workers alongside officers.

The video recordings show that before Chauvin and his fellow officers tried to force Floyd into a squad car, he was handcuffed and sitting against a wall. He was not a threat to anyone and his arrest was not a matter of urgency. That was the moment when a social worker could have been consulted or asked to the scene, if such a policy had existed. Almost certainly the outcome would have been different.

Other police departments have learned the value of social workers and mental health experts in dealing with drug crises. One of the pioneers has been the city of Huntington in West Virginia, a state ravaged by the opioid epidemic which for many years had the highest overdose rate in the country.

Among other things, the presence of a social worker as police dealt with people overdosing or having some other form of drug emergency helped officers see people addicted to opioids in a different light.

A former county police chief in Huntington told me the presence of social workers had transformed his thinking and that of many of his officers, who previously could not see the point of rescuing someone from an overdose only to see them do it again.

The former chief likened it to the revelation brought about earlier in his career by training in why some women remain in abusive relationships even after police are repeatedly called.

Related: American Overdose by Chris McGreal; Heartland by Sarah Smarsh – review

There is enough that is worrying about Floyd’s state of mind and health on video footage played in court for Chauvin and the other officers to have sought medical help. Instead there seemed to be just a determination to make an arrest – even though Chauvin could just have written Floyd a ticket for using a counterfeit $20 bill.

But then perhaps, like a lot of other officers who encounter drug users in crisis, Floyd was seen as an “addict” to blame for his own condition.

Ross told a different story of Floyd sucked into the trap of opioids by sports injuries, and prescribed oxycodone for pain. The medicine, marketed as OxyContin, is a powerful narcotic which did so much to drive the opioid epidemic. Over two decades its maker, Purdue Pharma, unleashed mass prescribing of painkillers on a scale not seen in any other country.

“We got addicted and we both tried to break that addiction many times,” Ross said.

Ultimately, Floyd failed to make that break, and was condemned for it.

• Chris McGreal is the author of American Overdose, the Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts