Videos purportedly showing police officers overdosing due to exposure to the potentially deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl have gone viral on social media. Many of these depict an officer who collapsed on the ground and was rushed to the hospital, supposedly for having had superficial contact with the drug. While fentanyl is fueling the nationwide surge in overdose deaths, there’s no scientific evidence to support the claim that mere“fentanyl exposure” is enough for the opioid to enter the bloodstream and cause an overdose. What’s going on here? The New York Times speculates that the videos are proliferating because police officers now on the front lines of the epidemic face a very different landscape than they did in the past, as the human misery of the epidemic is largely mostly hidden from view, a tragedy that is borne by the users and their families. Every hour, 12 Americans die from a fatal overdose, usually alone and with nobody there to revive them. The videos seek to identify the new villain in this drama and the shocking peril of the drug, but inadvertently invert reality—in that, it’s not the officers who are in danger. There is concern that these videos will worsen that danger and also drive the use of criminal charges to punish people for exposing officers or emergency responders to the drug.
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Rosenthal Center for AddictIon Studies