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Wednesday, July 13, 2022

What’s Really Going On In Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos?

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

It’s nearly impossible for an overdose to be caused by brief contact with the drug. It is possible these videos will worsen the danger for those truly at risk.

For the past five years, I’ve watched a bizarre news cycle play out on repeat. The most recent recurrence began on June 16, when KCTV5, a local news organization in Kansas City, Mo., published police body-camera footage under a dramatic headline: “ ‘I Knew I Was Dying’: How 5 Rounds of Narcan Possibly Saved KCK Police Officer’s Life.” 

The operative word in that sentence is “possibly.” The footage shows a police officer standing on a snowy lawn in what looks like a suburban neighborhood, wearing sunglasses and disposable gloves, inspecting pills stashed inside a crumpled piece of paper. “Seal it up — that’s fentanyl, dude,” another officer says. “Get that in a bag quick, so we don’t have an exposure.” 

The time stamp on the video then jumps to five minutes later. The officer who held the pills is now collapsed on the ground, limbs splayed as though making a snow angel. We hear another officer yell, “Narcan, Narcan, Narcan!” The fallen officer gasps rapidly as his fellow officers, with what seems like genuine panic, spray the opioid-overdose antidote up his nose several times.

Drug users, not the officers prodding at the contents of their pockets, are the ones in the most danger.

The officer was taken to a nearby hospital and later released, and, like clockwork, the vivid footage began circulating. But there’s one major problem with all this: It’s nearly impossible for the symptoms depicted to have been caused by “fentanyl exposure.” The scientific literature shows, definitively, that brief contact with fentanyl is not sufficient for it to enter the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier to cause such a rapid overdose. 

All the way back in 2017, America’s leading toxicological societies noticed the spread of these viral exposure stories and tried to put them to rest; there have since been countless fact-checks and scientific debunkings by major news outlets, including one from The Times’s editorial board. Last month, a 33-year-old clinical toxicologist and emergency-medicine pharmacist named Ryan Feldman co-published a case study about the time he accidentally spilled a mammoth dose of pure liquid fentanyl all over himself at work; he simply washed it off, with no adverse effects.

It’s not that the symptoms seen on video are feigned. Some psychologists suggest a kind of “mass psychogenic illness” is afoot, or a form of conversion disorder — neurological symptoms without a clear physical cause — or, potentially, simple panic attacks. Police officers have been told, by authorities including the Drug Enforcement Administration, that microscopic amounts of fentanyl can be deadly; they are taught to fear this substance. 

Their bodies may react accordingly, exhibiting symptoms, like rapid breathing, that are indicative of distress and panic. (Fentanyl produces the exact opposite effect; high doses result in slow and shallow breaths.)

KCTV5, after receiving responses questioning its reporting, appended an editors’ note that did not mention the medical consensus on this question, noting instead that medical records showed the officer “was treated for fentanyl exposure” and that the D.E.A. had affirmed that its agents’ potential exposure to fentanyl “puts their safety and health on the line.”

Three or four decades ago, the American media found itself producing plenty of readily identifiable villains in the nation’s war on drugs. The Miami of the 1980s, for instance, became a high-intensity zone of armed conflict between cocaine traffickers and the government, an era that inspired countless stylized Hollywood action flicks about cops, drugs and cartel enemies. 

By the 1990s, local news — increasingly entrenched in the business of covering crime — sustained a national obsession with urban gangs, which were depicted as so well armed and lawless that a bipartisan consensus formed around cutting the police blank checks to combat them; departments across the country received billions of dollars’ worth of military-grade equipment, from flash-bang grenades and night-vision goggles to armored trucks, for use in executing even low-level drug warrants. Nightly news broadcasts portrayed both drug users and dealers as dangerous elements concentrated in poverty-blighted “inner cities,” yet always at risk of creeping into the middle-class viewer’s suburb.

Police officers on the front lines of today’s drug war confront a very different landscape. The human misery of today’s overdose crisis is largely hidden from view, and it is certainly not centered on the police; it is squarely borne by drug users and their loved ones. Every single hour of every single day, 12 Americans die from a fatal overdose, according to preliminary C.D.C. data — a slow- motion disaster quietly playing out in banal locales like residential neighborhoods, gas-station bathrooms and strip-mall parking lots, in the smallest towns and the largest cities, across social and economic classes. 

Fatal overdoses occur largely among those who are using substances alone, with no one there to revive them with Narcan. Unlike the police officers, they don’t hyperventilate and gasp for air. Instead, they slowly drift off, gradually stop breathing and never wake up again.

Today’s astonishing overdose death toll comes not from gang violence or turf wars but from a ubiquitous market of cheap and potent synthetic drugs. And so it is in the drugs themselves that police officers now see grave danger, including to themselves. Last year, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department produced and released its own public-safety video featuring what Sheriff Bill Gore described as “traumatic body-worn camera footage” of an officer’s life-threatening fentanyl exposure — footage that circulated through various media outlets despite the skepticism of health professionals. 

It’s as though each of these videos seeks to identify the new villain, the shocking peril, in an era whose drug-war battlefields are too diffuse and mundane to capture the public imagination. Images of cinematic urban war zones and Uzi-toting gangsters have been replaced by the knowledge that drug use quietly pervades communities of all sorts. 

So fear attaches to something equally slippery: fentanyl particles lurking in the air, or even just a few specks on a police uniform, blamed for one officer’s “overdose” in Ohio. (According to local reporting, the officer was eventually terminated from the force for, among other reasons, “gross misconduct.”)

These viral “exposure” videos have a way of inverting reality. The people with whom the police interact every day, the civilians and communities they are sworn to protect, are often people whose main crime is that they are struggling with addiction — which is to say that they, not the officers prodding at the contents of their pockets, are the ones in the most danger. 

There’s concern that these videos will only worsen that danger, not just by making people so terrified of invisible fentanyl traces that they hesitate to aid drug users experiencing overdoses, but also by driving the use of criminal charges to punish people for exposing police officers or emergency responders to drugs.

The story from Kansas City reported that, before the officer collapsed, he was on his way to deliver food to families in need at a local church. Suddenly, he and his fellow officers were dispatched to a burglary, where they found a few pills on the suspect — someone, perhaps, who turned to theft to sustain a drug addiction. This is a story that makes the police sound brave and sympathetic, but its central question remains obscured: What are they really so afraid of?

new york times

35 comments:

  1. Never trust cops especially Midwestern American cops

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    1. Boy your right I actually trust cops in Mexico, they get paid well, in Tijuana the police do not ask for mordidas, when you get a ticket. Oh yes they are better paid than USA officers. In the US you have to buy your own bullets.

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    2. Same with midwestern tenants

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    3. @12:34 Are you high? The cops in TJ are even worse than the cartels. Extortion, horrible violations of human rights, arresting people for nothing… And yes even Americans that go over there are treated this way

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    4. 1:21 he/she merely being a joker, since 11:52 is being a jokester.

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    5. US COPS are always looking for opportunities to enhance their paycheck, and finding every little risky shot helps them, come think about Uvalde tejas, the cops saved their lives by staying away from possible contamination with drugs the kids bring to school...

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    6. Oh brother SIR is fuked on Meth again

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    7. 7:50 a comment that makes sense.

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  2. San Diego had a similar incident with a video posted by SD County Sheriff's, and it was widely disputed in the scientific community, leading to a slight walk back by the Sheriff.

    I think a lot of these law enforcement really think it's true, (that a touch can kill) but it also helps public opinion, and funding, but the deaths alone should be enough, but the whole "enough fentanyl to kill 8 million people" is grossly over stated and misrepresented.

    Many people believe that fentanyl is just poison, when in fact most users don't die, and keep using. Most fentanyl deaths are from deliberate ingestion with pills.

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    1. I wonder if they are referring to car fentanyl which was created more to be a chemical weapon. Car fentanyl is supposedly 1,000 times step get than fentanyl and was made for urban chemical warfare and it's ability to kill others without making the area impossible to be in.

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    2. J, you are very wrong. I've worked a substance abuse counselor and most, if not all, you wrote is false.

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  3. The Times piece actually mentioned the SD incident, I hadn't read when I posted.

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  4. You mean to tell me American police would lie to push a fake story and make themselves look better? No way lmfao

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  5. More people than ever before are dying from Fyntenal......so yes let's try and spread the word that it really isn't that bad......sounds like Bidens explanation on historic high inflation.

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    1. No joke fentanyl kills.

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    2. 12:59 better Biden's explanation than the trumpanzee's ultra-violent light and Chloro for Covid 19, or for the donations he stole from other countries and mobsters and americans

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    3. Clearly you must be part of the 15% that thinks Biden is doing a good while the rest of the country sure wish they could have some mean tweets back along with low gas prices, affordable housing and cheaper food......in fact the entire world was in a better place under Trump....thankfully come 2024 we will get to see him server his 2nd term.

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    4. 8:50 if it was up to me, I would Narionalize strategic resources Oil for national security reasons, remember it was Stalin that sent the Koch grampas back to the US???
      Just like Putin's investors bought Facebook initial public offering before it went to market

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    5. I love this story...if you actually read the article it's right...you can't overdose on fentanyl just by touching it...you have to get it in your blood stream by snorting, shooting or even eating it. He's not saying it's not a dangerous drug...he's just spitting facts

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  6. It’s true that it won’t absorb through your skin enough to cause effects but this whole narrative trying to say you can’t OD from inhaling particles in the air or this whole thing about “needs to be 2mg” I’m calling bullshit on

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    1. Keyboard warriorr you need to step out more often. From the basement, read up on it go to your local library. Do research on it. In the end you will find out, it can be absorbed through your pores. Have a great day.

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    2. 2:14 Can you please stop being so ironic? I already know it has some transdermal bioavailability but it has extremely poor bioavailability through that route of administration unless it’s in one of those patches that has various other ingredients to help with absorption. Obviously you’re not gonna get high just by touching it and I’ve already researched this shit plenty so I don’t even see your point. My point is that people need to research it because it’s not evident that you “need” 2 full milligrams to overdose or that you can’t be affected through contact in the air. Nice self-projection. I bet you even believe the stories about people overdosing just because they were near someone on it who was sweating lol…

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    3. 2:14 don't be a pusy and get it on the arm, grow the fuck up, life is not only about injecting marihuana...

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    4. Yea keyboard warriorr basement go research the drug before Jim to conclusions.

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  7. Why you Keep advocating for CJNG hoez...

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    1. Who are you directing that to?
      1:31 lost in space.

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  8. Funniest thing is, that this only happens to COPS IN USA..! Nowhere else do ppl flop while handling it.. As someone whose GF died in Fentanyl,i know what it does..And what it DOESN'T. And it certainly doesnt kill from a skin contact. Reason why only in USA is your "Trained to be Coward" cops like the ones in Uvalde.. People would die all over the place like Flies, if this were true.. AmeriKKKans will believe anything if it's said in TV..

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    1. No one‘s talking about through skin contact (obviously that’s a myth) we’re talking about through inhaling particles in the air. That’s what people debate over.

      Also you’re saying cops don’t do this in other countries when it comes to fentanyl but fentanyl is only currently a major problem in the U.S. and Canada

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  9. Things cannot be made to just look ok when talking about the risks with these drugs. And so i feel that some embellishment is done. But look i believe in being recreational as long as it's just that. But i can tell you that I've done up to 80 mg of hydrocodone in a few hours. But another time. Just did 5 mgs to try of buprenorphine and i kept throwing up for a while. So i realized that some opiates are very strong. I have to admit that it's crazy to know of something that if you "touch it", can put you down .....

    Something about how fentanyl crosses the fat barrier that even other opiates can't do right away in your brain.


    🤔 " I don't know"

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    1. It will only absorb through skin in patch form. The powder form doesn’t really do that. And if you did use powder to do that it wouldn’t be easy and would take many hours.

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  10. lmao, his source was the new york times

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  11. I’m an ex addict. Your breathing slows to an almost stop. Not some panic hyperventilating like this example.

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  12. You know I was going to really tell you guys facts.. but then I got High

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