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