Despite what seemingly every cop in America might tell you, you can not overdose on fentanyl by touching it.
You can, however, give yourself a panic attack if enough of your fellow no-necked, crew cut appreciators have told you that being in the same room as the powerful opioid is a death sentence.
In spite of its nasty role in the epidemic of overdoses in the United States, fent is not manufactured by some black market concern entirely focused on lethality. Fentanyl is a drug with practical purposes that is administrated by hospitals. That wouldn’t be the case if it could go airborne like Captain Tripp’s and cut Blue Oyster Cult a hefty music synch check.
That didn’t stop the Orange County Sheriff’s Office from being the latest police org to fall victim to their own paranoid minds. Officers discovered a substance that they believed to be fentanyl and reacted as if they’d just touched cesium-137. Officers administered the anti-overdose drug Narcan — still not available over-the-counter in much of the country, by the way — on themselves and were hosed down by firefighters afterward.
The best way for OCSO deputies to avoid fentanyl overdoses is to not sample fentanyl. If that’s not what’s happening, they just need to take a few breaths.
OCSO weren’t content to keep their overreaction to themselves. They made a secondary mistake and posted their fent freakout to the internet, where cops thinking fentanyl can drop a man at 500 yards is the regular subject of derision.
We’ve collected a few of our favorites in the hope that everyone involved learns a lesson.
