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Are Police Overdosing By Touching Fentanyl? Experts Say It’s Unlikely.


Green, like Holt, rejects the idea that any first responder’s reaction to the presence of fentanyl is brought on by anxiety or a nocebo effect. “I’m a pretty hardened guy,” he said. “Nothing really rattles me.” He is no longer with the ELPD. A review of internal documents showed he was terminated after a number of violations uncovered by an investigation ordered by East Liverpool Mayor Gregory Bricker, including dishonesty and discourteous treatment of the public. Green told BuzzFeed News he believes he was let go because he raised concerns about corruption in the department and is mounting a legal challenge to ensure “the facts will come out.”

He has since found employment working in drug detection for a private company and told BuzzFeed News it is essentially the same job he had with the ELPD, but he makes “a ton more money.” Green is thrilled with his new gig, saying, “My passion is drugs. Like if I was allowed, I would literally be a cop for free if I could just hunt drugs and drug dealers all day.”

He also dismissed doctors’ insistence that passive exposure cannot cause an overdose, saying, “I don’t really care what the naysayers say or feel or whatever. I know what I experienced, and it’s godawful.”

It’s impossible to say for sure what is really going on in these instances, though Green and Holt both remain adamant that passive exposure is an overdose threat and the police are not lying or experiencing panic attacks. First responders, Green said, are either “really good actors and we have an elaborate hoax going on or the shit is real.”

Stolbach, who helped author the 2017 position statement from the American College of Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology task force, said that what happened in the San Diego Sheriff’s Department video showed “some sort of medical event, but not opioid-poisoning definitive.” He doesn’t know why the message that these types of overdoses are impossible isn’t taking hold in police departments, even years after the possibility of passive overdose was debunked.

“Every police officer or police official that I personally come into contact with, they’re on board with me and they understand, and yet, somehow, this message isn’t penetrating the police,” he said, adding that between the medical and law enforcement communities, “there’s not a lot of interface.”

Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University who is a former senior policy adviser to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, believes resistance to accurate information about the possibility of exposure overdoses isn’t just an issue among first responders. His concern lies with prosecutors.

“It may not be an entirely rational process for them,” said Humphreys. “They could just be glad to have another way to charge people. Generally, as prosecutors, the more things you can charge somebody with, the more power you have, so even if they knew that this was mostly hysteria and hokum, they might still welcome the power. I don’t know if you can change that.”

Fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin, but only under unique circumstances. Fentanyl patches are used therapeutically by medical professionals all the time, which may have contributed to the belief that instantaneous absorption and subsequent overdose are possible.



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