Cops are still fainting when they touch fentanyl [View all]

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://defector.com/cops-are-still-fainting-when-they-touch-fentanyl/

Ryan Feldman was holding an IV bag when it happened. Something ripped when he pulled the line out and almost an entire bag, with 950 micrograms of liquid inside, spilled and doused his hand in fentanyl. “I was a little annoyed at first,” Feldman told me. “But then I realized: Sometimes in science an accident is an opportunity.” Basically, Feldman realized he had an experiment on his hands—literally.

Feldman had seen the spate of stories in the news about police officers (and other emergency personnel) who have allegedly overdosed after merely touching fentanyl. The drug is an opiate, about 50 times stronger than heroin, and has largely replaced heroin and other opiates in the recreational drug supply in the United States. This has led in part to a massive rise in overdoses despite the relatively wide availability, under the brand name Narcan, of naloxone, a drug that can reverse an overdose.

As a toxicologist, Feldman would also have been able to see the glaring problem with all those stories of police officers suffering dermal fentanyl overdoses, which is that such a thing is basically impossible. Fentanyl is skin soluble—but not at a rate that would cause an overdose. And so Feldman was abruptly the subject of a nice little experiment: His ungloved hand was doused in fentanyl, after all, and he even had a cut on his palm, allowing the spilled fentanyl easier access to his body. It was about a minute before he washed his hands with soap and water.

Feldman did not overdose. He did not even suffer any ill effects. His paper with Benjamin Weston, “Accidental Occupational Exposure to a Large Volume of Liquid Fentanyl on a Compromised Skin Barrier with No Resultant Effect” was published last week. “If there’s an exposure that happens to be on your skin,” Feldman says, “you have time to wash it off.”

I was interested in this paper because of how clever I found it: Feldman turned an accident at work into an academic paper. But I was also interested in it because, despite a growing and relatively large push by doctors and scientists and even journalists, police continue to experience ”overdoses” after touching fentanyl—sometimes even just after being near it. Because fentanyl is everywhere, these stories are everywhere, too, and reported just as credulously as they were before people started pointing out that there was effectively no way that any of this could actually happen.

*snip*