fentanyl fearmongering
addressing fake fentanyl features and media's relationship with law enforcement
Well folks, it happened again. Another story has cropped up about cops touching fentanyl and overdosing and being rushed to the hospital. Such a dangerous job they have! We really must give them more sympathy — and funding, of course.
These stories seem to have become especially prevalent in the last few months. A cop — or sometimes a random person in a fast food parking lot — picks up a dollar, or is investigating a crime scene, when suddenly they collapse! And are rushed off to the hospital because they claim to have overdosed. A local TV station picks up the story, takes the officer’s word as fact, and gets no follow up from the doctors or family members to see if the victim was, in fact, exposed to fentanyl.
This trend has had me fuming lately, especially media’s handling of stories like these. Law enforcement can seemingly tell media anything about fentanyl and its dangers, and some media outlets report it as fact. Lately, it’s been these stories of cops touching fentanyl and overdosing, or news that “rainbow fentanyl” is targeting children and will be in your kids’ Halloween candy this year.
I want to clear up some things about these stories, which are absolutely full of holes. They are more hole than substance, in fact. And I want to be clear about this as well — fentanyl is absolutely dangerous, and I don’t want to diminish that. If you’re doing drugs that aren’t coming from a dispensary or your own backyard or lab or something, you should be testing them (get testing strips here!). Fentanyl is all over the place and it’s responsible for a lot of unintentional overdoses. But these stories are taking advantage of that fact to fearmonger to people. So let’s get to debunking, and then to analyzing media coverage.
overdose by touch
There are a lot of logical fallacies in this phenomenon. Let’s start with the most basic: You cannot overdose on fentanyl by touching it. That is simply not how drugs work. This article from science.org makes a really excellent point — if you could get drugs in your bloodstream by skin contact, why don’t we see people rubbing fentanyl into the backs of their hands to get a quick fix?
Let’s take a look at that story linked at the top of the article. In the story, the cops claim that the perp they were chasing took a bag out of his pocket, ripped it open, and threw the drugs at them (a real Dale from King of the Hill pocket sand moment). When the guy TORE THE BAG OPEN, did he somehow manage to keep it all contained, and all downwind, so it only touched the officers and not himself? Gotta say, that’s some extremely impressive maneuvering. Almost unbelievable!
Furthermore, drug dealers handle fentanyl with their hands all the time without ODing — and, critically, so do doctors. These cops and reporters may need a reminder fentanyl is a high-powered opioid that is often used in hospitals for pain management. Also, shouldn’t cops be wearing gloves at crime scenes anyway?
Yes, fentanyl patches exist, which technically get the drugs into people’s bloodstream by skin contact. But you’d need a ton of them stuck on you for a long time to overdose, and that’s a different formulation than powder or pill fentanyl. The fact of the matter is that touching fentanyl without ingesting it will not have any impact on you at all.
So why are these cops appearing to overdose?
There are a couple reasons, some more sinister than others. The first one is that they’re having panic attacks. They’ve been told how dangerous fentanyl is, and when they come into contact with it, they freak out, and pass out. Lots of doctors have said that episodes these cops are having are more in line with a panic attack, because if they were actually overdosing, they would get high first. The cops don’t report a sense of euphoria, it’s more like a regular old things-go-blurry type thing and they collapse.
Another reason is that cops want us all to know how dangerous their jobs are so that they can justify needing more funding. Look how at-risk we are at any given moment, they want to say. Look how we can be such good guys but could fall victim to dangerous drugs against our will in an instant!
Other reasons for this schtick include: Maybe the cop has been doing heroin or fentanyl and wants a reason for it to show up on a drug test. Or, they’re planting drugs in a crime scene and as they’re doing so, they get caught, and pretend to OD.
Nothing about the behavior of cops leads me to believe that any of those aren’t true.
rainbow fentanyl in your kids’ halloween candy
We’re really going back to the 1980s with this one. Razor blades in your kids’ candy! Don’t take homemade goods, they’re full of weed! These claims were obviously pretty baseless back in the 80s, or they happened once or twice and became a sort of urban legend. There’s a great “You’re Wrong About” episode on this.
So the whole deal with rainbow fentanyl is that the DEA has found fentanyl pills that are multicolored. They say that they look like Sweet Tarts or Skittles (I don’t know if the DEA has ever seen a Skittle) and that Mexican drug cartels (obviously the most predatory groups to us all at any given moment!) are trying to get kids hooked on the drug, so they have more and more people to sell to. They claim they’re using bright colors to entice kids, or to trick kids. The pills, they say, have enough fentanyl to kill a child.
So I hope you already have questions. Like, are they trying to kill children or get them addicted to fentanyl? Because they’ve claimed both. But beyond that, experts and researchers say there is absolutely no evidence that these multicolored fentanyl pills are being targeted towards children.
This Salon article talked to some actual drug researchers and experts who say these claims are total bullshit. They say they’ve been seeing multicolored fentanyl pills for at least a year now. This is not a new drop that launched just in time for Halloween.
“Dasgupta says it is ‘irresponsible and reprehensible’ that news outlets are reprinting this DEA alert without any pushback. ‘It's exactly the kind of behavior from the news organizations that leads to misinformation and panics and detracts from the very real public health dangers that we can and should be focused on,’ he says. ‘This is not one of them.’” — salon.com
And just like the touch-overdose story, there are holes. What does a drug dealer stand to gain from giving a random child — who they’ll never see again — a drug so that they’ll have a bad time at some point in the future? And again, if there’s enough fentanyl in these pills to kill a child, how would that help get them hooked on the stuff?
I hope that’s enough to show you that these claims are hyped-up nonsense. But if it’s all obvious enough to a media-literate person with Googling skills, why do so many media outlets report these stories as fact?
media and law enforcement
Media has a problem sometimes with its sourcing. The truth is, mistrusting law enforcement institutions is still a more fringe ideology in media. Lots of journalists are still of the belief that cops are generally good, but there are some bad apples. You will be hard-pressed to find police abolitionist arguments on the homepage of the NYT or of your local TV station’s website.
Many journalists think cops and the Drug Enforcement Agency, plus the FBI, the CIA, whatever, are generally good institutions doing good for the world, and that there isn’t a reason to question their authority. Plus, in a lot of cases, especially in local media in more conservative or rural areas, you would totally erode your audience’s trust by questioning cops of any kind, resulting in lower viewership or listenership and as a result, less money.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t try, though. Journalism’s job is not to cater to an audience’s pre-existing beliefs, it’s to teach, inform, challenge, seek truth, and question the systems that we have in place. Unfortunately, doing journalism in a late-capitalist society means that you’re usually owned by a large corporation that cares a lot about numbers — clicks, listeners, viewers, advertisements, sponsorships.
But again — that shouldn’t stop us from trying. Journalism as a whole should stop viewing law enforcement as experts on certain matters. We don’t report things politicians say as fact without checking them (I mean, at least most of us don’t) and we should treat law enforcement the same way. Cops, the DEA, and all those other agencies are the institutions we are here to investigate and question — we do not exist to be their mouthpiece.
So until media can fundamentally change, recognizing patterns of bullshit is up to you. Next time you log onto Facebook to see that your great aunt has shared a story like this, check it out, see what the sources are, and make judgments for yourself on if it’s believable or not. Ask what the source quoted in the article might stand to gain from sharing this narrative. And maybe leave a comment on your great aunt’s post telling her that’s not how drugs work…if you have the mental capacity for a potential Facebook fight.