Several experts have questioned the body camera footage released by the San Diego county sheriff’s department that showed a deputy collapsing after exposure to fentanyl during an arrest last month.
Several medical and addiction experts have said that the footage released by the sheriff’s office on Thursday promoted a false narrative about fentanyl and the ways in which it can lead to an overdose.
Dr Priscilla Hanudel, an emergency medicine physician in Los Angeles, was quoted by ABC News as saying that the officer was more likely to have fainted or suffered a seizure than to have had any reaction to fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 80-100 times stronger than morphine and heroin.
Dr Stephanie Widmer, an emergency medicine physician and medical toxicology fellow in New York, was also quoted as saying: “People with the intent to get high, may overdose after snorting or insufflating fentanyl — this is not to be confused with passively inhaling fentanyl powder that somehow became suspended in the air.”
She added: “Overdosing from such an exposure would be exceedingly rare and likely unheard of.”
The video by the San Diego sheriff’s department was part of an effort to raise awareness about the increasing rates of fentanyl overdoses. But medical experts have increasingly pointed out that misinformation about contact highs does little to help curb the opioid crisis in the country.
Dr Hanudel claimed that law enforcement officers and health care workers don’t experience overdoses of fentanyl and such a reaction is “almost never seen.”
She said that “it takes about 200 minutes of exposure to reach a starting dose. It would be very unlikely to happen in a very brief exposure.”
She also pointed out: “We wouldn’t want first responders, police officers, healthcare workers to have a fear of something that is extremely unlikely and that would prevent them from doing their jobs with confidence.”
Meanwhile, the Drug Policy Alliance also released a statement, calling the San Diego county sheriff’s department video “unconscionable and completely irresponsible.”
It said that “content like this simply creates more fear and irrational panic that fuels further punitive responses to the overdose crisis.”
Ryan McNeil, an assistant professor in the Yale School of Medicine and director of Harm Reduction Research with the Yale Programme in Addiction Medicine, told ABC News: “We have experienced such profound loss across this country, with nearly 100,000 losing their lives last year to overdose. The last thing that we need is misinformation circulating about fentanyl because this will lead to ill-informed and ineffective responses.”
He added that “it might make people less likely to respond if someone does have an overdose and needs to be administered naloxone or administered CPR. That would be tragic.”
Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, told the New York Times that “it was not biologically possible” to experience overdose symptoms, or to die, from touching or being exposed to the drug.
Proffessor Beletsky also pointed out that the only way to get fentanyl into someone’s system through their skin “is by using medically prescribed fentanyl patches for pain, and those have led to very few if any, fatal overdoses.”
He told the New York Times that “if people think that they might die of an overdose from providing emergency assistance — that might cost lives.”
