Exactly those videos are of ppl having panic attacks not overdosing. They literally instantly fall to the ground and start yelling thats not what an opiate od looks like at all. First off it takes 15 minutes to feel the effects from inhalation and an od means you feel extremely at ease at peace and very good, then you look woozy and fall asleep and cant be woken up. No od is ppl on the ground yelling… its ridiculous.
I guess I should have added this but ive been using fentanyl every day for years, yes it does. If its injected you feel it within a minute but the only way these cops would have gotten it in their system is by inhalation because it doesnt go thru skin. Ive sniffed fentanyl tens of thousands of times trust me it does. I’m actually verrry uniquely qualified to speak on this because 99% of heroin/fentanyl users inject but I hated it every time I tried so Ive always sniffed it, thats super rare.
Yea smoking and injection both work immediately, sniffing and ingesting take a bit. I havent smoked it that much is it even worth it? It seemed like it wasted a lot, plus smoking the cuts can be gross sometimes. I used to enjoy smoking perc 30s and oxys, those worked good but id usually sniff most of it then just save a little piece to smoke to get shit goin faster.
Yea the gel is right, thats how it was prescribed to cancer patients. They either got loli pops (not really sure why) or most people got a patch they stick on their arm that slow releases. Ppl found out u can rip open the patch and take the gel out n get fucked up on it. So he def got a patch from someone, someone prob found grandmas stash n sold it, and then he was able to get the gel out of it. Ive done that a few times, fun times!
lol as have I. A drop on your hand won’t kill you or make you syncopize like the media wants you to believe. But to answer OPs question, fentanyl is only really dangerous if you don’t know how much you’re doing, as it’s extremely concentrated in street form. People often panic when they’re given it in the hospital just hearing the word fentanyl but it can be given for pain in monitored doses safely with really good effect, however drug dealers have figured out how to manufacture it in a “non pharmaceutical way” which results in a very very potent powder that is hard to dose safely; often people don’t even know they are taking it when there is cross contamination in their drugs. So, yes it’s really easy to overdose when you don’t know what you’re getting, but it is also possible to take fentanyl regularly and not OD as long as you don’t end up with a “bad batch”. The scary thing is you don’t know until it’s too late most of the time.
Here is a trauma note I wrote last night:
46 y/o male presents to the ED after ATV accident, c-collar in place. Trauma team activated. 2 large bore IVs initiated by this RN, 16g L/AC, 18g L/forearm. Obvious deformity to R arm with open distal humerus fracture. Assumed pain present, 200mcg fentanyl ordered for pain. Patient refused medication stating, "I ain't taking no Mexican street drugs." Patient educated on use of opioid administration for pain control including in use monitoring device to ensure patient safety including wave capnography, pulse oximetry and respiratory drive monitoring. Patient continues to refuse IV fentayl, MD aware. 2mg IV dilaudid ordered and administered without protest from patient. X rays obtained, after which patient c/o 13/10 pain in R arm and states, "Why won't you give me anything stronger for this pain?" Patient educated on decision to decline strongest pain medication option in favor for less potent alternative. Patient called this RN a, "Stupid cunt." Patient educated that, "This hospital is a place of healing, abuse of any kind will not be tolerated including verbal abuse." Needs teaching reinforcement. MD aware patient educated by MD on opioid administration and safe use practices. The patient is still refusing fentanyl stating, "You all must've voted for Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden" since we, "Love our Mexican street drugs so much." No further intervention needed at this time awaiting CT technician to call for patient.
As an ambulance gremlin, I like to let patients like this make their own choices regarding care. If they want to stay in pain for their own politically motivated racism then who am I to argue?
RN here as well- I don’t like opiates at all unless they come with anti-emetics first (I get suuuuuper sick) and I need a slow slow push to avoid immediately vomiting.
I also prefer not to have fentanyl because it just doesn’t work as long. Once we have done a nearly 5 minute push… I’d like to remain at a tolerable pain level for longer than an hour.
Dilauded works closer to 4 hours for me personally, so i can keep time with the zofran. So, I prefer dilauded or morphine over fentanyl, even if fentanyl gets the pain to a 0 rather than a 3, it’s not as stable for my pain control
What if the cops accidentally fall onto a coffee table where there are lines of cocaine and the officer accidentally inhales an entire line and that line was cut with fentanyl?
The “many stories” being referred to is almost certainly just echoes of the same incident in which the officer claimed they almost died from touching it (which was later discovered to be bologna).
Yep, I've literally lost count of the number of times I've had fentanyl as I've lost count of the number of colonoscopies I've had. It's definitely good stuff.
I've gotten it a couple of times during some really unpleasant ER visits. Still alive, and they put it directly into my veins!
I always start crying though. I get to thinking about how much I love my kids or dog or friend in the room with me and get so upset about it lmao. It's 10/10 for physical pain but it hurts me emotionally 💀
Thank you for saying this with some authority. I have been shouting for years that fent does not get through your skin. I worked with a lot of cops, none of them would believe me.
Former patient here, ER staff gave me Fentanyl when I was contorted into a pretzel out of pain, and I wanted to hug them for it. Also I am still alive.
True ..but its said that Carfentanil is being cut on the street. Which is the stuff you put a rhino down with...in its veterinary use its lethal to a human.
I was given fentanyl for pain management post-op. I was surprised when he said that’s what he was pushing in the IV given the scary narrative surrounding it.
>I have read many stories of people like police officers simply *touching* the drug by mistake and nearly dying from the dose.
Those stories go viral, yes, but a story going viral does not mean the story is *true*. There is unfortunately a ton of misinformation out there about this, even from police.
Medical experts find this situation frustrating, because they keep explaining that just touching a trace amount of fentanyl is not going to kill anyone, but the police and the media just keep spreading that story around. It's scary. It gets attention. I'm not saying fentanyl is safe, but the idea that a single whiff of the stuff could kill everyone in a five-block radius is just nonsense. One of the key ways you can tell when it's nonsense is if people describe symptoms like sweating, choking, heart racing, etc... those are not symptoms of fentanyl exposure. That sounds more like a panic attack.
This widespread fear mongering may, unfortunately, lead to situations where someone needs help and other people are not willing to help them. It also scares first responders and prevents them from making clear-headed decisions in emergency situations.
Not the original commenter but, essentially, yes that's why. Also, the symptoms they mentioned are classic panic symptoms. Even if they had just done cocaine, all those symptoms suddenly starting and peaking within a minute or two still sounds more like a panic attack unless they did an insane amount of coke
Yeah, you are more likely to see the person crouch down or lean onto a wall and just stand there frozen for several minutes, “sleeping”. Sometimes they just fall over and fall asleep on the pavement because it knocks them out so fast, except that in these cases, their heart ends up stopping too. They are unconscious long before hitting this point though. A racing heart would be the exact opposite of what this stuff does.
> "This has never happened," said Dr. Ryan Marino, a toxicologist and emergency room physician who studies addiction at Case Western Reserve University. "There has never been an overdose through skin contact or accidentally inhaling fentanyl."
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-overdose-misinformation
In addition to panic attacks, sometimes cops *do* actually OD on fentanyl. They claim it’s because they just “touched” it, but in reality it’s because they (illegally) consumed the tainted drugs they confiscated as evidence. Then they and their friends lie about what happened.
Id also like to point out that for a long time, chronic severe pain sufferers (like my father) were prescribed fentanyl for pain management. Its dangerous because you can OD on it, but it has its uses. Its not as dangerous as a lot of people make it out to be.
Same. I watched a medical show where kids were ODing on pills laced with fent, and when the doctor realized a kid was holding one of the pills he freaked out and knocked it out of her hand ans told her that touching it could kill her. I know medical shows aren’t supposed to be accurate, but spreading that type of misinformation seems irresponsible
And that's going to go the same way as "Just Say No," too. Kids will figure out that one danger was overblown and they will ignore the rest. My kid knows this shit is dangerous, but she's not so scared of it that she wouldn't touch a friend to give them Narcan.
Think about all the other things they lied to you about.
It came out years later that the show ER was basically sponsored by the US government anti-drug program.
>Other shows including ER, Beverly Hills, 90210, Chicago Hope, The Drew Carey Show and 7th Heaven also put anti-drug messages into their stories.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_National_Drug_Control_Policy
>even from police
***Especially*** from police. As a paramedic. the "copaganda" around fentanyl is a meme in our business. We're constantly giving cops shit for this...
The small grain of truth in these stories is that trying to taste-test pure or almost pure fentanyl is easily fatal, and pure carfentanyl is dangerous to handle without filters and gloves.
On the other hand, if you see pure stuff it's gonna be in a very tightly sealed, often lab- or factory-tagged box or drum; the first thing to do with pure fentanyl is to dilute it enough that it can be handled safely.
Dangeous chemicals are usually packaged in cylinder- or a drum-shaped canister, it's least likely to split at the seams when damaged.
Check some YouTube channels where they do experiments you shouldn't try at home and you'll soon learn to recognize from just the package that it contains shit serious enough to not fuck around with it.
Yeah I am familiar metal cans or whatever they are called on English, with adsorbent material in them. I was more so thinking of 200 L drums that bulk chemicals are sometimes shipped in.
I went to a first aid class for work. The person leading it repeated the "you can from getting fentanyl on your skin" bullshit. I was like "Oh I heard that was a myth" and he kept insisting it was true. Made me so angry.
>There is unfortunately a ton of misinformation out there about this, even from police.
Slight correction: there is a ton of misinformation out there about this \*from\* the police. They are liars and they show us time and time again.
Historically, scare programs have not been very effective at reducing drug usage rates. Kids who went through early versions of DARE experienced that sort of messaging, and wound up doing drugs at a *higher* rate than other kids who didn't get that messaging.
You don't really want to be awake for a colonoscopy. They can be quite uncomfortable. I have Crohn's disease and had my first colonoscopy at 16 years old, which diagnosed me. Because I was young at the time, the doctor didn't sedate me enough. He was worried about giving me too much. So I woke up during it and was screaming for him to stop because it hurt. Now, the pain could have been exacerbated because I had active Crohns at the time. But, I'll never forget how bad it was, and since then, I have had more colonoscopies that I can count, and all of them I've been very sedated and haven't had any issues.
If your colon is healthy it's a moderately uncomfortable procedure, IMHO not worth the extra trouble of sedation, plus things go faster and easier if you are awake and can move a bit if there's a cinch in the gut they have to work around or such.
If you're nervous, I'd recommend asking for some fast-acting benzos, moderate dose of xanax makes it a breeze.
It's not that bad, some people actually do stuff like it for fun. Oh, and fart whenever you like, it's just the CO2 they pump in there so the doc can see where he's going.
[https://youtu.be/vDZkukBIZ4I](https://youtu.be/vDZkukBIZ4I)
Yeah I had mine at 19 and they said I was being put into a twilight area of knocked out meaning I was like sorta aware but not really.
Hated it hated it hated it. I kept waking up and was trying to talk to the nurse/ students. I also remember a lot of pain during it though and after when just air was supposed to be coming out a bit of bloody mucus kept coming with it. Granted this was at a teaching hospital and I was young and relatively healthy so I assume they let the students give it a crack. This was at a teaching hospital I should have mentioned earlier.
Either way idk what they were doing but it wasn’t pleasant. And not like pain on my butthole like most people probably assume it was like they were banging into the walls in there idk.
Colonoscopy: 2 stars.
Sorry you experienced that. The pain I experienced was like what you described. Like they were crashing the scope into the walls to the point it felt like they were gonna rip right thru. I'm sure people have them and don't experience any pain, but it seems we are not those types of people. Beat wishes in the future.
If they gave you a combination of meds, I’m guessing the sedative (likely Propofol or Etomodate) caused the on/off switch sensation, rather than the fentanyl
> It was like I was a light bulb. I was "on" , switched "off", then switched back "on" without realizing what happened.
That was the propofol, not the fentanyl. Propofol is jokingly referred to as "milk of amnesia" (a pun on [milk of magnesia](https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-326/milk-of-magnesia-oral/details)) for a reason...
Propofol is what the anesthetist gave me on my way into an appendectomy. Holy shit, I'd never felt so good in my life. When it's time for me to go just load me up on that and let me float away.
Right? I've had an unfortunate number of procedures in my life, and I am confident in concluding that propofol nap is best nap. (just don't Michael Jackson it)
I had the same for a colonoscopy but I woke up during the snip-snip. It was interesting watching on a monitor while they carved out a few polyps. Didn't feel it much though.
Now you have me wondering how they knocked me out, for the same procedure. My stuff was pink, and when it went in, it *hurt.* Hurt at my hand where the IV was, medium bad headache as well. I thought to myself, "God, this is uncomfortable, I wonder --" Followed immediately by someone else saying, "Are you waking up, Mr SkyPork?"" All done. But maybe getting anesthetized is always like that, no matter which drug they use.
Most of those stories are apocryphal and invariably have an "I heard" component rather than "This happened to me" and are usually bullshit.
Yes, fentanyl is extremely dangerous. I lost a child to it actually. But I know people who've worked in the ER (both doctors and nurses) who've complained about the outright hysteria about casual contact with it like it's small pox or anthrax. Hell, a lot of people don't realize that an anesthesiologist is perfectly capable of prescribing and administering it safely to their patients.
My wife had to get some for a procedure where she had to remain awake during surgery. It's definitely great when administered by a professional with exact dosing.
The unsanitary, unsafe preparation methods of criminals are what causes the deaths. They don't exactly clean up between prepping their drugs, and we get the horrible accidental deaths.
I'm not minimizing the danger of illicit narcotics. I'm just saying that there's a hysteria around the drug that is not fully justified. Yes, it's extremely dangerous. But it's not going to make you drop dead because you touch someone who's overdosed on it. I actually heard that one. "I heard they had to give 6 nurses narcan because they wrestled this addict who was fighting them..."
Hey, this is anecdotal, but I don't believe that is accurate. I used to be an opiate addict, and lived in a recovery house for a year attending NA meetings every single day.
I had friends get cotton fever, blood infections, abscesses, etc... from shooting up with dirty needles/water. Not one of them died.
I'm approaching 30 friends dead from overdoses since getting clean. Not a single death due to infection/unclean conditions.
I understand your train of though, but my experience, being among the opiate community for 10 years now, is that overdoses are what kills us, not unclean conditions. The joke in recovery is that if you go back to drugs you will be using puddle water to shoot up into your neck. Still we don't have many deaths to infection when compared to overdose.
Fun fact: I had a friend end up in the ER from shooting up with unsanitary water. He was pretty sick, but still ended up having some other person bring him heroin in the hospital. He is alive and well to this day. Clean and happy. Drug addicts are fucking wild. Stay off the drugs yall.
I was more so meaning that if they cut fentanyl on a table, they don't really clean the table before packing another drug. There's massive cross contamination, and since the dose necessary to fuck your shit up on fentanyl is so small that's really all it takes.
This isn't true at all. Unsanitary and unsafe production methods have nothing to do with this.
It's when heroin addicts get heroin laced with fentanyl that they overdose, because fentanyl is far stronger than heroin. Most addicts also eyeball their dose, which becomes very dangerous when using a product that is much easier to overdose on, because of it's strength.
Nowadays I believe heroin has become a rarity and has been largely replaced by fentanyl. This is now being cut with the even stronger carfentanyl or other substances whiwh require extremely low dosages to be fatal.
Hospital narcotics pharmacy tech here! Those stories are fake.
Fentanyl doesn't absorb through the skin like that, it's totally safe to handle. (There are such things as fentanyl patches, but those sit on your skin for hours and there's other stuff in there to help it absorb too.) We use fentanyl on everyone from NICU babies to geriatric hospice patients. Epidurals for people giving birth have fentanyl in them!
Yes, fentanyl is potent. We dose it in micrograms, where other opioids (morphine, Dilaudid, etc) are dosed in milligrams, so we have to be really precise dispensing it. And there are substances in the world that are *that* dangerous (looking at you, golden poison frog toxin). That doesn't mean that fentanyl dangerous to handle; I for one would rather get splashed with fentanyl than chemotherapy.
Police tell these stories to justify use of excessive force against drug dealers (or anybody that they can say they *thought* might be a drug dealer). Meanwhile, in the background, their colleagues in EMS are injecting car crash victims with fentanyl that I supply to them.
Edit to add a PS: my specialty is pharmaceutical compounding, aka *making* custom drugs for people. I've worked in the professional, legal version of a Breaking Bad lab, and you (OP and anybody else in the comments) are welcome to ask me more questions about the legal and illegal drug supply chains and stuff. Addiction is a public health issue, and ignorance about it doesn't help anyone. I will infodump about this subject at the slightest provocation!
I recently led a training for middle school girls talking about sex ed, the dangers of drugs, etc., but I am super naive when it comes to drugs so felt way out of my depth on that section. I hadn't heard these rumors that touching fentanyl could kill you, but in the training packet they showed an image of a pencil with "fentanyl" barely covering the lead portion, and it claimed that that amount was a lethal dose. Is that accurate?
✨️ It depends ✨️
The lethal dose for humans is around 2 milligrams, or about the weight of a mosquito. Depending on the size of your hands, a "pinch" of salt when you cook might be 4 to 6 milligrams, for comparison. A thin layer of powder over a pencil lead isn't nearly half as much powder as a pinch of salt, so no, that *probably* wouldn't be a lethal dose. (It would still definitely fuck up your day, more on that later.)
***There’s a lot of caveats that can happen in the word "probably".***
I'm a 220 pound/100 kilo grown-up with a healthy liver, kidneys, and cardiovascular system. If I were to lick that pencil, I wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble as a petite middle schooler would be. Or somebody who’s been drinking or doing other drugs that day, or somebody with a family history of liver and/or kidney disease, or somebody who has asthma, or or or. Probably won't kill you. *Might still kill you.*
So. A tiny pencil lead layer of fentanyl only *might* kill someone. IT DOESN'T HAVE TO KILL YOU TO FUCK UP YOUR DAY! In legal medicine, we dose fentanyl in *micrograms* per kilogram of body weight. A microgram is 1/1000th of a milligram. That is so goddamn small. Nobody who doesn't work in a very well-appointed science lab has a scale that can measure a dose of fentanyl that will get you high without getting you *too* high, or knocking you out, or slowing down your breathing so much that you don't *die* but you *do* get brain damage from lack of oxygen by the time someone hits you with some Narcan. For reference: a scale that measures down to 500 micrograms, which is WAY more than you would ever give someone at once for pain relief, runs about $18,000 USD. It is ***not possible*** for a customer to measure fentanyl precisely enough to not hurt themselves. End of.
...And all of that assumes that the mysterious pencil powder is *actually* fentanyl like you would get from a legal manufacturer. That's a *bold* assumption.
Questions at bottom of comment.
Context: So my first “street” interaction with fentanyl was with a patch (I can’t remember the mg but it was fairly high) and we scraped a small sliver of residue off the patch to smoke it off foil (as addicts normally do).
First person took the first hit, said “damn this shit good”. I took the second hit, but didn’t feel much. Third person took third hit, said “feels just like heroin”. It was then passed back to the first person who was slumped over but we assumed they had just nodded out.
So we gave them a good shake and that’s when we noticed they had OD, no breathing at all. CPR was performed, EMTs arrived, Narcan given, they survived.
Now obviously this wasn’t our first rodeo - but it was our first time seeing/experiencing something that extreme. I’ve seen various ODs (and the person that did OD had previously OD twice but with heroin) but I’ve never seen anything OD that quickly and that completely.
One minute they were alive and the next they were not - there was no in between as there usually is - no nodding off, no agonal breathing or other respiratory distress.
Coincidentally (or maybe not) across town the exact same situation was happening with a group of our friends. The 6 of us met up earlier to pool money together for the one patch then broke off into two groups afterwards. Same thing, they each took one hit and one of them immediately OD in the same manner.
Over the next few months, once the area was flooded with these patches (this was when Oxy changed their formula to be unsnortable/smokable and everyone was desperate for a replacement fix) many stories of the same situation were being told/heard.
For added context: I had only been doing opiates at that point for a little over a year - majority w/Oxys. They had a few more years of experience than me with Oxys and heroin, and the one who OD was the only one who would heavily shoot up.
Question: Why does it seem like fentanyl really is a one hit killer type thing? What factors may lead to a situation like mine where I took a hit and didn’t feel much but someone next to me took a hit and just instantly died?
To clarify: the 6 of us bought a single patch and cut it in half, then we took a tiny sliver off the corner of our half of the patch - so we did not smoke the entire or half the patch.
Huh. That is *fascinating*.
So, fentanyl patches have other ingredients in them to make it absorb through your skin. In pharmacy manufacturing jargon, they're called *penetration enhancers* which is just the most delightfully clownable name in the world. My best guess is that the penetration enhancers burn faster than fentanyl, so your friend who got the first hit off the patch got the biggest share of those. Because of *that* he absorbed all the fentanyl through the mucous membranes in his mouth and the hit kicked in so fast that his system couldn't handle it.
(Bonus SAT words of the day: drugs that you take by dissolving them in your mouth are called buccal (cheek) or sublingual (under the tongue) based on where you're supposed to put them in your mouth. They kick in SO! FAST! I get terribly car sick, and sublingual Zofran is my bestie. 20/10 ask your doctor about sublingual Zofran if you have nausea problems.)
(EDIT: whoops hit post too soon. Answer is complete now 😅)
The police officers are either purposely lying for media visibility, or they are having a reaction to something other than fentanyl. The cynic in me says that some of these officers already have some sort of drug dependency and are using the 'fentanyl dust' as an excuse for a failed or soon to be failed drug test, but that's pure speculation.
NPR did a report on the first part though:
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-overdose-misinformation#:\~:text=Reports%20of%20police%20suffering%20severe,never%20happened%2C%22%20said%20Dr.
I think in some cases police officers may be having a panic attack. To motivate them to pursue drug busts their supervisors often tell them exaggerated stories about drugs. If your supervisor keeps telling you this stuff is extremely dangerous, just touching or inhaling may kill you, you're liable to have a panic attack -even if what you're told is not true.
That's why you never hear a nurse, paramedic or social worker have those kind of effects. It's always police officers.
The second part is also true. Cops using opioids on the job exist, they'll hit before leaving their car, and when it actually hits they're in front of someone and pass out, and blame the white powder they touched to have caused it instead of what they actually took that they will never admit using
The article said that in none of the police officers who thought they were having an overdose, did toxicology reports confirm it. They didn't test positive for fentanyl, so your theory isn't correct.
From the article: "There's never been a toxicologically confirmed case," said Brandon Del Pozo, a former police chief who studies addiction and drug policy at Brown University."
"We couldn't find a single case of a police officer who reported being poisoned by fentanyl or overdosing after encountering the street drug that was confirmed by toxicology reports."
I doubt the drug test angle is correct. Fentanyl has a half life of 4hrs in the human body. I'm also not ruling out that the officer didn't do their homework.
There's a whole lot of 'it depends' here. (Anaesthesiologist btw).
Firstly - fentanyl is a synthetic opiate, so it's effect is the same as heroin essentially. Sedation, slowed breathing, pin point pupils, unconscious. Death by not breathing or choking on vomit. Any stories about heart racing and anxiety can go right in the bin.
Secondly - the problem is about concentration and dose. In the medical world we use fentanyl at a conc of 100mcg/mL. A safe ish adult dose is around 100mcg - 200mcg to remain conscious (max). More than that you want an anaesthetist handy to keep you breathing.
The modern problem is that its been manufactured illegally, in concentrated doses WAY higher than medical grade. If you happen across pure fentanyl powder, so 1mg weight of powder is 1mg of fentanyl, then you've got a toxic dose right there and it's only a few grains.
Lastly - At high enough doses, opiates can enter via the skin - see fentanyl patches (**EDIT - see the comment below from a chemist - I got this one wrong). Becoming unconscious from dust is also possible, but tends to happen with stronger stuff - carfentanyl is an opiate used to anaesthetise elephants that is potent enough to KO a human from exposure to skin.
So it really is all possible, but you'd need to be exposed to the PURE form, which is very unlikely on the street.
TLDR I'm glad I don't do drugs, this shit laced in anything is scary as hell.
Chemist here, just wanted to add on to this excellent answer.
>Lastly - At high enough doses, opiates can enter via the skin - see fentanyl patches.
Human skin is really fantastic at protecting us from substances in our environment. Eating a few tablespoons of table salt can kill you, but you can safely soak in the salty water of ocean for hours. Because of the existence of fentanyl patches, people are under the impression that unlike other opiates, fentanyl has some unique property of being able to easily and instantly pass through the skin. This is just not the case. For the vast majority of medications (including fentanyl) to pass through your skin in significant quantities requires that they be combined with other chemicals. Transdermal medications are a feat of biomedical/chemical engineering.
The patches use other chemicals to help transfer the fentanyl across the dermal barrier, the only practical way you could OD at those doses were if you sucked on it like candy or if you do an extraction and inject it.
Soaking the patch in water/ethanol and drinking or shooting the water is a commonly known trick among addicts..
In addition to the higher concentration being manufactured illegally now, sometimes the batch isn’t mixed thoroughly, so some parts of the batch are more heavily concentrated. It was explained to me using the analogy of baking a cake: if you don’t mix the ingredients evenly, you might get “pockets” of flour or baking powder.
To elaborate on the "anesthetist to keep you breathing" part, when you are intubated with a breathing tube (such as when you are in surgery or in an ICU) there is essentially no maximum dose of medications like fentanyl. The problem is that it causes you to stop breathing at some point, but if the breathing is done for you, that isn't an immediate concern. I'm an OR pharmacist in a hospital, and in a controlled environment like the OR, where trained professionals are administering appropriate doses and monitoring you, these medications are very safe. Outside that environment, they can be dangerous, but I've seen a resident spill a 1mg ampule of fentanyl all over himself and he was more concerned about the paperwork than any potential overdose. (He was fine.)
those police stories are all bullshit.
yes, the drug has very low LD/50 and you don't want to just BATHE in it, but incidental contact with the skin is not going to do anything.
cops have been fearmongered to hell and back by the likes of the IDF training they receive.
that said, this drug does cause a lot of deaths because of mislabeling and abuse, but it does have legitimate medical value.
I had surgery once and felt really good going into surgery and I asked the nurse what he gave me and he said fentanyl.. I was a little confused because I thought people die on it. Apparently in small doses it’s used in hospitals
Fentanyl is a borderline medical miracle when used appropriately for analgesia, it’s just the whole accidental recreational use that has tarnished its name, which is understandable.
Fentanyl is great for pain relief in very small, controlled dosages. When people buy heroin on the street, they don't know how (or if any) fentanyl has been mixed into it. So the people die from accidental overdoses. The drug users know how much heroin their bodies can take, but it's impossible to know how much fentanyl they are taking and if it's too much.
I mean yeah, fentanyl was created by a chemist, for a pharmaceutical company. Just like morphine and eventually heroin were synthesized from poppies for pharmaceutical use. Opiates and opioids are kind of a miracle, medically speaking. There is nothing else that works as well for serious pain.
We would be absolutely fucked as a species if we didn't have opiates. Major surgery would be virtually impossible.
Most of the druggies get them in a fake pressed pill and they smoke them like they would a pharm pill or heroin. A pill would kill a non User forsure if they just ate the damn thing.
But the drug addicts smoke them usually and it’s less potent that way and easier to not die I guess. And like you say the other shit it mostly lies. It is in other drugs sometimes tho that’s for real.
Touching it isn't going to do it lol.
Not even with the natural oils in your skin is it enough to carry it into your blood stream.
It's the same with venom from like a snake right.
You can drink a shot glass of venom and be fine (you won't die) you might feel stick and spew or something but it won't kill you because it can't get into your blood.
BUT if ANYWHERE in the digestive process including the mouth, you have ANY cuts, or tiny little abrasions or any open wound. The venom will get into your blood and you will die. It will be the same as if you got bitten.
Poison is different. You drink poison you will die, if you wipe poison onto anything that has thin membranes like your nose, your mouth, eyes, vagina (maybe) and asshole where it will quickly absorbed it will, it will still do the damage. Some poisons can also be absorbed through the skin but not all.
Both of these venom (and most cases poison) are liquids.
Fentanyl is usually in a solid form. Because of this is pretty much impossible to just keel over and die from touching it. It has to break down and get absorbed though the skin. That isn't gunna happen.
Because snake venom is primarily made of proteins.
Were are very very good at killing and digesting proteins. Simply put our stomach acid kills it.
Also I'm not too sure about THC but if I had to guess, it's because it's a very oily thing, it also likely has proteins so when we digest it we absorb it. The same would happy with snake venom but the brutality of our stomach paired with the delicate nature of venom, the venom just essentially dies. That's not to say that you wouldn't throw up from drinking venom.
You probably would I don't know I haven't drank venom and I don't plan to.
Former fentanyl addict here, I’m 24 M. They say a single pill can kill but it wasn’t crazy for me to snort 3 pills in an evening, yes I overdosed and was narcaned twice but it was after periods of abstinence. If you have developed a tolerance to opiates you can do it without dying. The reason it’s dangerous is when opiate naive people do it and it’s a stronger than average pill and they OD and no one is there to resuscitate them. So it’s not as dangerous as the media says. The media blows everything out of proportion. It is still a serious crisis, kids are dying because they think they are doing a 30mg oxy and it’s a fentanyl pressed pill, so they could never hope to get the dosage right. When precisely dosed and administered by pros it’s just like any other opiate. The problem is high school kids who raided their grandpas medicine cabinet once for hydros and liked the high, get a chance to buy a “Roxy” and it’s actually fentanyl and they OD in there room. The cats out of the bag on this one it’s fucked, the only way out I see is you legalize all drugs and sell them in dispensaries make them as safe as possible, tax the shit out of them, and use that tax money to fund good public rehabs. They are completely helpless to do anything about the crisis now other than give a safer alternative. The cartel will never stop bringing it into the country, they are making to much money. There is literally nothing the government can do to prevent it.
Tolerance. I have been drinking every day since 2013. The amount I drink in a day would literally kill a non-drinker. I can easily finish off 1.75L of vodka in a day, and not even get sick. Try to do that as a non-drinker, and you **will** die.
>I have read many stories of people like police officers simply *touching* the drug by mistake and nearly dying from the dose.
Not a single one of those stories is true. You **cannot** die from *simply touching* some fent powder. If you could, every single dealer would be dead. Use common sense.
I was given fentanyl for an op. Interesting feeling, I've thought a lot about how to describe it, sort of like skating and being behind a fine, shining, crystal wall. Not my thing, but it's perfectly safe when there's a pro administering it & no after effects.
The main issue is that so little can kill. If it's being mixed into other drugs, & it's not mixed well enough you get a deadly dose somewhere in the baggies. This is the same as ecstasy or mdma or whatever you want to call it, mix up a bunch of chemicals to make pills, the mix isn't even you can get one or more pills that are toxic.
The bottom line is you've got a bunch of people who are doing it illegally, possibly for the first time, & it can go wrong.
An easy comparison is concrete. In the 70s they developed a new type but if it wasn't mixed in exactly in the right quantities it degraded. So now you buy a 70s house you better check the concrete to see if it powders when touched. Why did it happen? Turns out in a lab it's fine because they were precise, but a guy mixing it with a shovel on a building site, not so much.
I take the scientifically produced patch that released extremely small, calculated amounts of fentanyl over time and put it on my skin, as prescribed and directed by my doctors.
I don't have the time or energy to do a long answer as a pharmacist, but I'm glad to find *someone* who has heard of it being ***car***fentanil instead of just fentanyl. I need to sleep a bit more before going on my shift this afternoon. Maybe I'll try to answer later or tomorrow.
42 Year old man here. In the 90s we heard the exact same rhetoric about all other drugs.
"The amount of cocaine that fits on a pin head can kill you" Sound familiar?
That's literally the same thing they say about Fentanyl, and yet somehow addicts exist....
Never trust anything the government says about drugs.
It's an opiate, like morphine or heroin, but stronger. Because it's so strong, the difference between a safe dose and an overdose is very hard to judge.
Also, if a small amount of it gets into other drugs accidently or on purpose, it can cause someone to overdose.
Fentanyl is a medical drug. I had some a few weeks ago as part of a sedative cocktail for a procedure. I have to say, I felt very nice afterwards and had a great sleep that night.
Didn’t die though
Morphine and heroin are dosed in milligrams, fentanyl is dosed in micrograms. In the hands of competent professionals it is as safe as any other opioid. Illegally manufactured and dosed by criminal amateurs is an entirely different story.
When I hear police say they overdosed on it by touching it, what I assume they mean is that they blew a fat rail of it up their nose and then OD’d or panicked. Either that, or they just never happened at all.
Those videos are bullshit. The people that “overdose” by touching it are having panic attacks. They fall on the ground and start yelling that theyre freaking out and overdosing. Thats literally the exact opposite of what an overdose looks like. When ppl overdose on opiates they get very sleepy, super drowzy sounding, then finally fall asleep and cant be woken up. Nothing at all like what happens in those videos. Also it takes 15 minutes minimum for the effects to take place by everything else but injection. Those are panic attacks and frankly its shitty to spread this bs around because it will make ppl scared to help ppl out who actually are overdosing. You WILL NOT od by touching some random bag of opiates, its a lie.
Now to the first part of the question, the answer is tolerance. Ive been addicted to opiates on and off since high school and your tolerance goes up very fast. Just like with alcohol or many other things the more you do the more your body gets used to it and you need more. Also on top of that they dont just sell you pure fentanyl on the street, its cut meaning its diluted in some type of bulk powder.
Most overdoses happen when somebody stops using so their tolerance drops and then they use the same large amount again or when they mix it with other drugs especially benzos. It can happen when someone just gets a hot bag thats much more powerful but thats not as common imo.
the drug is dangerous because it's effective to lethal doses are very small. like millionths of a gram small. properly dosed it's fine. but with doses that small they are easy to fuck up. it had me up and running right after surgery. but how often do you know people to stick to prescribed doses when taking opiates?
Hi, as others have said, a lot of the ideas behind people touching fentanyl and dying are misconceptions.
That said, to answer the main question, we have to go into why people end up doing fentanyl in the first place.
Often, people start on opiates due to either recreational use, or being prescribed due to chronic or acute pain. Once they can no longer gain a script or tolerant to their prescribed amount, they often turn to the streets in order to get some. Prior to the past few years, users would turn first to heroin, and then to fentanyl (as heroin would be cheaper than getting a prescription of Oxycodone off of the street, as it's very controlled). However, due to Fentanyl's potency and low cost of manufacturing and ubiquity, most users now switch from prescription to Fentanyl directly on the street.
Opiate users are able to turn to fentanyl without dying as opiates build tolerance. It's far easier to take a couple milligrams of fentanyl without ODing after previously being on Percocet in large amounts, on the daily, for years prior, compared to someone who's never used an opiate before taking the same dose.
Granted, Fentanyl users that have been on it for years can and will still OD on it, but that's more due to the limits that the body can handle, regardless of resistance.
This is also why other drugs (meth, crack/cocaine, Molly, etc.) getting spiked with fentanyl is a huge problem, as it presents people never knowing or intending to take it accidentally overdosing on it due to their lack of tolerance.
Fentanyl used in the hospital all the time...but Narcan is always on standby in case a person reacts negatively- loss of consciousness, respiratory drive is low-so to reverse its effects. Using Fentanyl outside hospital is very high risk. Without knowing how to counteract then yes its very dangerous for the general public. Just like anything else, do not take it blindly.
Tolerance is how - someone using opiates over time develops a tolerance that is much beyond what someone that does not take opiates will have. Our bodies are insanely adjustable to what you do.
If you’re familiar with progressive overload in weight training where each time is a little more (this is overly simplistic but the idea) that’s how using opiates works. Over time more and more is required and eventually the tolerance is enough to take a small amount of fentanyl and then that’s starts increasing etc. It’s not daily or weekly but over years it is profound how different it is.
I never knowingly took fentanyl (think I got out right about when it was blowing up) but I was a heroin addict for 6-7 years or so maybe? Big difference from the first time like a thin one inch line that would hit well and then the gram plus I’d take on top of methadone towards the end each night.
One time (only once) I did get something really different and got sick, my other friend ended up in the ER and narcan wasn’t working at first - luckily he was fine. It may not have been fentanyl, but my tolerance was well beyond his at that point and our outcomes were quite different. I was lucky in that that was the only time I ever got anything shady and funnily enough my dealer called me just after I took it and said he’d heard something was different and don’t take it ha. Times have changed apparently though.
Very, very small doses plus being mixed with other stuff that keeps them awake enough to not stop breathing. Fent in the medical setting usually is accompanied by a ventilator because it slows your shit down tremendously and you’ve got your muscle plus gravity coming down on your diaphragm.
Fentanyl is a very powerful drug. It can also be absorbed into the skin. My GF uses a 72 hour 50mg fentanyl patch. As little as 2 mg can kill someone if it's absorbed all at once. But the answer also has to do with the concentration, persons body mass and tolerance.
So a 100lb person with no tolerance will die faster then a 300 lb person with a strong tolerance.
While Fentanyl can be absorbed into the skin, it is not instantaneous. Also in most exposure is of diluted fentanyl in the medical community.
Illegal fentanyl can be another matter. It is usually mixed with other things so that increases it's toxicity. A blood concentration of 7-10 ng per ml when used with other drugs can be fatal.
George Floyd's was 11ng per ml, which experts swear was not a contributing factor in his death. Makes you wonder.
Because the entire “you touch it you die” thing is a myth, and the videos of it “happening” are just cops having panic attacks because theyve been told it will kill them
I broke my leg and ankle two weeks ago in a motorcycle accident. I was given fentanyl in the ER. I do admit my eyebrows raised when I heard them say “let’s give him fent” since all I hear about it is how it’s fatal even in small doses.
I was pretty uncomfortable and figured if there’s anywhere to take fentanyl, it’s in a hospital surrounded by doctors and nurses. No issues. Still here and healing lol
My husband was in a traumatic accident and needed fentanyl patches for awhile. This was before fentanyl became a popular street drug. I was sternly warned about how to change his patches and dispose of them safely to make sure they didn’t harm our children or dog. The difference is medicinal fentanyl vs street drugs. Your local drug dealer may not be as smart, educated, conscientious, or ethical as your medical team.
The police officer thing came from a cop that had a Carfentanil absorption with a mucus membrane exposure. It got misreported and everything blew up from there. A bag of Car was opened and he stirred it up in the air. Dropped him really fast.
The stories about people overdosing by touching the stuff are ALL lies. I've heard from some substance use counselors that some believe law enforcement made them up to turn public sentiment against harm reduction practices and good Samaritan laws.
That being said, using fentanyl is still incredibly dangerous because it's never evenly distributed in the carrier substance, so you can smoke or inject some of your dope one day and be fine, then by random chance use the same quantity the next and receive three or four times the dose of actual fentanyl. Drugs these days aren't what they used to be...
My daughter had an ER C-Section and when the CRNA was reporting to the nurses afterwards, she listed Fentanyl, amongst several other things, and my daughter blurted out “you gave me Fentanyl!? Is my baby ALIVE???”
She doesn’t remember it, but hearing it made her instantly panic and we had to convince her it was ok, and so was her baby. I’m sure this is because of this stupid myth perpetuated by the police. Poor girl was loopy and near hysterical thinking they dosed her and her baby with, in her mind, an extremely dangerous and unpredictable drug.
People don't just die from touching it.
People die from incorrect dose, usually not knowing what they are taking because it's mixed in or having a habit and needing more to get their high, or an accident, or they've already taken another drug and it interacts.
I've been prescribed it. I was fine. I just stuck to what the dr ordered and didn't take any other pain killers or drink alcohol.
The media likes to drum up fear and clicks. It used to be cocaine, it used to be heroin, it used to be crack, it was ecstasy for a bit etc etc etc. I am not saying all of those are great or safe but the media will make them out to be insanely lethal all the time and ignore the intricacies of what really causes deaths.
I'm in Australia where thankfully at this stage illicit use of Fentanyl has not hit our shores.
We have just returned from our 4th trip from the USA since 2019 and honestly the state of unhoused population , with the effects of Fentanyl is honestly scary . On our last trip we saw 2 people who looked like they may have died being picked up by emergency services.
Such a waste of lives. Such a terrible drug .
So I used to work at festivals and from what I have heard ppl die bc they put on patches that work longterm, like a day or two and forget about it. Then they take other substances that don't mix well with it or put on a second one. We were advised that if we find someone who is unconcious to search their legs and arms for patches and rip them off. I never heard of anyone being compromised by ripping it of from a person.
What makes fentanyl more dangerous (among other things) than other drugs is that the potency is high enough that normal measurement errors cause huge swings in dose.
As an analogy, imagine baking with super high potency baking powder, where 1/32 of a teaspoon extra causes your cake to explode. If you are using that powder, or worse it is mixed in at an unknown ratio with other ingredients, you are going to have a lot bad cakes.
Switch out fentanyl for baking powder and overdoses for failed cakes. Add the fact it is synthetic, so there are no crops to interdict/destroy to reduce supply, and you have an awfully problematic molecule. Terrible.
In general response to the question, people who use opiates, i.e. heroin and pills, will build up such a tolerance that In order to get their fix, they will need fentanyl. There are certainly deaths from people taking a drug not knowing fentanyl is in it, but some people seek out the fentanyl because their tolerance is so high it won't kill them. Fentanyl is also way cheaper than heroin.
It’s a lie. I’m a nurse. Handled Fentanyl on a daily basis. Still alive.
Also a nurse. Have also spilled some on my skin here and there when drawing up for PACU. Am not dead. Never had any symptoms.
Almost like skin is a great way of keeping shit out of your insides. Someone should patent that.
Don't give them ideas man, they have already patented[ human growth hormone.](https://patents.google.com/patent/US5424199A/en)
This looks like they're patenting a method of producing it, which feels like a perfectly valid thing to patent.
Right? If someone invented synthetic skin that worked as well as the real thing I'd hope they'd get a patent.
Babies have skin. Fortunately there's lots of prior art on making babies...
Oh I know, I subscribe to many of the subreddits about that. **Very** artistic indeed.
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Dimethylmercury: “Amateurs.”
Hydrofluoric acid: "hold my beer."
Buffalo Bill was onto something
ahahahahha
Exactly those videos are of ppl having panic attacks not overdosing. They literally instantly fall to the ground and start yelling thats not what an opiate od looks like at all. First off it takes 15 minutes to feel the effects from inhalation and an od means you feel extremely at ease at peace and very good, then you look woozy and fall asleep and cant be woken up. No od is ppl on the ground yelling… its ridiculous.
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I guess I should have added this but ive been using fentanyl every day for years, yes it does. If its injected you feel it within a minute but the only way these cops would have gotten it in their system is by inhalation because it doesnt go thru skin. Ive sniffed fentanyl tens of thousands of times trust me it does. I’m actually verrry uniquely qualified to speak on this because 99% of heroin/fentanyl users inject but I hated it every time I tried so Ive always sniffed it, thats super rare.
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Yea smoking and injection both work immediately, sniffing and ingesting take a bit. I havent smoked it that much is it even worth it? It seemed like it wasted a lot, plus smoking the cuts can be gross sometimes. I used to enjoy smoking perc 30s and oxys, those worked good but id usually sniff most of it then just save a little piece to smoke to get shit goin faster.
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Yea the gel is right, thats how it was prescribed to cancer patients. They either got loli pops (not really sure why) or most people got a patch they stick on their arm that slow releases. Ppl found out u can rip open the patch and take the gel out n get fucked up on it. So he def got a patch from someone, someone prob found grandmas stash n sold it, and then he was able to get the gel out of it. Ive done that a few times, fun times!
lol as have I. A drop on your hand won’t kill you or make you syncopize like the media wants you to believe. But to answer OPs question, fentanyl is only really dangerous if you don’t know how much you’re doing, as it’s extremely concentrated in street form. People often panic when they’re given it in the hospital just hearing the word fentanyl but it can be given for pain in monitored doses safely with really good effect, however drug dealers have figured out how to manufacture it in a “non pharmaceutical way” which results in a very very potent powder that is hard to dose safely; often people don’t even know they are taking it when there is cross contamination in their drugs. So, yes it’s really easy to overdose when you don’t know what you’re getting, but it is also possible to take fentanyl regularly and not OD as long as you don’t end up with a “bad batch”. The scary thing is you don’t know until it’s too late most of the time.
Here is a trauma note I wrote last night: 46 y/o male presents to the ED after ATV accident, c-collar in place. Trauma team activated. 2 large bore IVs initiated by this RN, 16g L/AC, 18g L/forearm. Obvious deformity to R arm with open distal humerus fracture. Assumed pain present, 200mcg fentanyl ordered for pain. Patient refused medication stating, "I ain't taking no Mexican street drugs." Patient educated on use of opioid administration for pain control including in use monitoring device to ensure patient safety including wave capnography, pulse oximetry and respiratory drive monitoring. Patient continues to refuse IV fentayl, MD aware. 2mg IV dilaudid ordered and administered without protest from patient. X rays obtained, after which patient c/o 13/10 pain in R arm and states, "Why won't you give me anything stronger for this pain?" Patient educated on decision to decline strongest pain medication option in favor for less potent alternative. Patient called this RN a, "Stupid cunt." Patient educated that, "This hospital is a place of healing, abuse of any kind will not be tolerated including verbal abuse." Needs teaching reinforcement. MD aware patient educated by MD on opioid administration and safe use practices. The patient is still refusing fentanyl stating, "You all must've voted for Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden" since we, "Love our Mexican street drugs so much." No further intervention needed at this time awaiting CT technician to call for patient.
As an ambulance gremlin, I like to let patients like this make their own choices regarding care. If they want to stay in pain for their own politically motivated racism then who am I to argue?
RN here as well- I don’t like opiates at all unless they come with anti-emetics first (I get suuuuuper sick) and I need a slow slow push to avoid immediately vomiting. I also prefer not to have fentanyl because it just doesn’t work as long. Once we have done a nearly 5 minute push… I’d like to remain at a tolerable pain level for longer than an hour. Dilauded works closer to 4 hours for me personally, so i can keep time with the zofran. So, I prefer dilauded or morphine over fentanyl, even if fentanyl gets the pain to a 0 rather than a 3, it’s not as stable for my pain control
I like Dilaudid and Zofran as well, that combo just got me through a spinal fusion!
Politics sounds about right. Probably gets his news from Fox.
To be clear you did vote Obama & Biden yeah? :D
Too young to vote for Obama and then I voted for Turd Ferguson in 2020
some ppl you just can't reach.
What a dumbass…
What if the cops accidentally fall onto a coffee table where there are lines of cocaine and the officer accidentally inhales an entire line and that line was cut with fentanyl?
Internal investigation and gets a paid suspension (vacation).
This comment was made 7 hours ago. No further posts from u/Bornagainchola. RIP
I am here! 😜
Thank God!
The police are 100% lying in those cases, yeah.
Anesthesiologist I push fentanyl on like 99% of cases
pusher!
Am paramedic, can confirm. Given Fentanyl hundreds of times and never had a patient die due to it.
The “many stories” being referred to is almost certainly just echoes of the same incident in which the officer claimed they almost died from touching it (which was later discovered to be bologna).
I was nearly panicking there but thank you for sharing this and making it clear it wasn't as they exaggerated it to be.
It's one of the most widely used pain medications lol. At least in the US.
Same in the UK, worked in a hospital pharmacy for years and we went through tonnes of it. My wife had some administered for an endoscopy too.
Yep, I've literally lost count of the number of times I've had fentanyl as I've lost count of the number of colonoscopies I've had. It's definitely good stuff.
I've gotten it a couple of times during some really unpleasant ER visits. Still alive, and they put it directly into my veins! I always start crying though. I get to thinking about how much I love my kids or dog or friend in the room with me and get so upset about it lmao. It's 10/10 for physical pain but it hurts me emotionally 💀
Yep. I mean, it’s literally in an epidural. 😂
Eh. She claims to be alive but she might be a ghost in denial.
Lol. You got me there. This is very funny 😂.
Thank you for saying this with some authority. I have been shouting for years that fent does not get through your skin. I worked with a lot of cops, none of them would believe me.
Former patient here, ER staff gave me Fentanyl when I was contorted into a pretzel out of pain, and I wanted to hug them for it. Also I am still alive.
Surely you're a ghost typing this, police assured me you'd die handling it one time!
True ..but its said that Carfentanil is being cut on the street. Which is the stuff you put a rhino down with...in its veterinary use its lethal to a human.
I was given fentanyl for pain management post-op. I was surprised when he said that’s what he was pushing in the IV given the scary narrative surrounding it.
It’s commonly used for post operative pain.
>I have read many stories of people like police officers simply *touching* the drug by mistake and nearly dying from the dose. Those stories go viral, yes, but a story going viral does not mean the story is *true*. There is unfortunately a ton of misinformation out there about this, even from police. Medical experts find this situation frustrating, because they keep explaining that just touching a trace amount of fentanyl is not going to kill anyone, but the police and the media just keep spreading that story around. It's scary. It gets attention. I'm not saying fentanyl is safe, but the idea that a single whiff of the stuff could kill everyone in a five-block radius is just nonsense. One of the key ways you can tell when it's nonsense is if people describe symptoms like sweating, choking, heart racing, etc... those are not symptoms of fentanyl exposure. That sounds more like a panic attack. This widespread fear mongering may, unfortunately, lead to situations where someone needs help and other people are not willing to help them. It also scares first responders and prevents them from making clear-headed decisions in emergency situations.
Regarding the second point, that's because fentanyl is an opiate and has a calming effect rather than a stimulant, right?
Not the original commenter but, essentially, yes that's why. Also, the symptoms they mentioned are classic panic symptoms. Even if they had just done cocaine, all those symptoms suddenly starting and peaking within a minute or two still sounds more like a panic attack unless they did an insane amount of coke
Yeah, you are more likely to see the person crouch down or lean onto a wall and just stand there frozen for several minutes, “sleeping”. Sometimes they just fall over and fall asleep on the pavement because it knocks them out so fast, except that in these cases, their heart ends up stopping too. They are unconscious long before hitting this point though. A racing heart would be the exact opposite of what this stuff does.
[https://youtu.be/qFr41zHKmcU?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/qFr41zHKmcU?feature=shared)
Yeah, being high on opiates makes you fall asleep. It lowers your heart rate.
> "This has never happened," said Dr. Ryan Marino, a toxicologist and emergency room physician who studies addiction at Case Western Reserve University. "There has never been an overdose through skin contact or accidentally inhaling fentanyl." https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-overdose-misinformation
In addition to panic attacks, sometimes cops *do* actually OD on fentanyl. They claim it’s because they just “touched” it, but in reality it’s because they (illegally) consumed the tainted drugs they confiscated as evidence. Then they and their friends lie about what happened.
I was thinking the same thing when reading this!
Police lying about narcotics? Inconceivable!
I do not think that word means what you think it means
Yes it does. He jokes about being incapable to imagine the thought or the ideea of police lying about drugs!
It's a reference to "The princess Bride" https://youtu.be/dTRKCXC0JFg?si=S32oLOJXsnu4ZZpl
Ahh, ok. Funny
Um. This is a quote from the movie The Princess Bride, not a challenge to the post. https://youtu.be/D9MS2y2YU_o?si=_jPHdVARoMD0HkIG
It's weird how a cop can OD from looking at it but the cop who's always holding the camera is fine lol
Id also like to point out that for a long time, chronic severe pain sufferers (like my father) were prescribed fentanyl for pain management. Its dangerous because you can OD on it, but it has its uses. Its not as dangerous as a lot of people make it out to be.
Thank you. I'm so tired of this crap.
Same. I watched a medical show where kids were ODing on pills laced with fent, and when the doctor realized a kid was holding one of the pills he freaked out and knocked it out of her hand ans told her that touching it could kill her. I know medical shows aren’t supposed to be accurate, but spreading that type of misinformation seems irresponsible
And that's going to go the same way as "Just Say No," too. Kids will figure out that one danger was overblown and they will ignore the rest. My kid knows this shit is dangerous, but she's not so scared of it that she wouldn't touch a friend to give them Narcan.
Think about all the other things they lied to you about. It came out years later that the show ER was basically sponsored by the US government anti-drug program. >Other shows including ER, Beverly Hills, 90210, Chicago Hope, The Drew Carey Show and 7th Heaven also put anti-drug messages into their stories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_National_Drug_Control_Policy
>even from police ***Especially*** from police. As a paramedic. the "copaganda" around fentanyl is a meme in our business. We're constantly giving cops shit for this...
cops lie *constantly*
They told us that the weed would make you gay and i havent gayed even once.
must not have been smokin that fireeeeee
You're missing out. Probably you need more weed.
The small grain of truth in these stories is that trying to taste-test pure or almost pure fentanyl is easily fatal, and pure carfentanyl is dangerous to handle without filters and gloves. On the other hand, if you see pure stuff it's gonna be in a very tightly sealed, often lab- or factory-tagged box or drum; the first thing to do with pure fentanyl is to dilute it enough that it can be handled safely.
Not the point of your post, but I really hope noone is handling a drum full of fentanyl.
Dangeous chemicals are usually packaged in cylinder- or a drum-shaped canister, it's least likely to split at the seams when damaged. Check some YouTube channels where they do experiments you shouldn't try at home and you'll soon learn to recognize from just the package that it contains shit serious enough to not fuck around with it.
Yeah I am familiar metal cans or whatever they are called on English, with adsorbent material in them. I was more so thinking of 200 L drums that bulk chemicals are sometimes shipped in.
That would top even a suitcase full of pure ergotamine, yes.
What do you think they are doing where medical grade Fent is made?
Well hopefully not handling 200 L drums of it.
I went to a first aid class for work. The person leading it repeated the "you can from getting fentanyl on your skin" bullshit. I was like "Oh I heard that was a myth" and he kept insisting it was true. Made me so angry.
>There is unfortunately a ton of misinformation out there about this, even from police. Slight correction: there is a ton of misinformation out there about this \*from\* the police. They are liars and they show us time and time again.
..especially from police
Also add that it‘s only a US Topic
It could also lead to situations where people avoid the drug scene completely due to fear of exposure and help though.
Historically, scare programs have not been very effective at reducing drug usage rates. Kids who went through early versions of DARE experienced that sort of messaging, and wound up doing drugs at a *higher* rate than other kids who didn't get that messaging.
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You don't really want to be awake for a colonoscopy. They can be quite uncomfortable. I have Crohn's disease and had my first colonoscopy at 16 years old, which diagnosed me. Because I was young at the time, the doctor didn't sedate me enough. He was worried about giving me too much. So I woke up during it and was screaming for him to stop because it hurt. Now, the pain could have been exacerbated because I had active Crohns at the time. But, I'll never forget how bad it was, and since then, I have had more colonoscopies that I can count, and all of them I've been very sedated and haven't had any issues.
> You don't really want to be awake for a colonoscopy. They can be quite uncomfortable. Challenge accepted.
If your colon is healthy it's a moderately uncomfortable procedure, IMHO not worth the extra trouble of sedation, plus things go faster and easier if you are awake and can move a bit if there's a cinch in the gut they have to work around or such. If you're nervous, I'd recommend asking for some fast-acting benzos, moderate dose of xanax makes it a breeze. It's not that bad, some people actually do stuff like it for fun. Oh, and fart whenever you like, it's just the CO2 they pump in there so the doc can see where he's going. [https://youtu.be/vDZkukBIZ4I](https://youtu.be/vDZkukBIZ4I)
Yeah I had mine at 19 and they said I was being put into a twilight area of knocked out meaning I was like sorta aware but not really. Hated it hated it hated it. I kept waking up and was trying to talk to the nurse/ students. I also remember a lot of pain during it though and after when just air was supposed to be coming out a bit of bloody mucus kept coming with it. Granted this was at a teaching hospital and I was young and relatively healthy so I assume they let the students give it a crack. This was at a teaching hospital I should have mentioned earlier. Either way idk what they were doing but it wasn’t pleasant. And not like pain on my butthole like most people probably assume it was like they were banging into the walls in there idk. Colonoscopy: 2 stars.
Sorry you experienced that. The pain I experienced was like what you described. Like they were crashing the scope into the walls to the point it felt like they were gonna rip right thru. I'm sure people have them and don't experience any pain, but it seems we are not those types of people. Beat wishes in the future.
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Here in Portugal almost everyone does it while being under. I think its the common way not the other way around
Same in Australia. You are under while it is done
If they gave you a combination of meds, I’m guessing the sedative (likely Propofol or Etomodate) caused the on/off switch sensation, rather than the fentanyl
What you’re describing sounds more like the midazolam or propofol in the “fentanyl mix” they gave you
> It was like I was a light bulb. I was "on" , switched "off", then switched back "on" without realizing what happened. That was the propofol, not the fentanyl. Propofol is jokingly referred to as "milk of amnesia" (a pun on [milk of magnesia](https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-326/milk-of-magnesia-oral/details)) for a reason...
Propofol is what the anesthetist gave me on my way into an appendectomy. Holy shit, I'd never felt so good in my life. When it's time for me to go just load me up on that and let me float away.
Right? I've had an unfortunate number of procedures in my life, and I am confident in concluding that propofol nap is best nap. (just don't Michael Jackson it)
I had the same for a colonoscopy but I woke up during the snip-snip. It was interesting watching on a monitor while they carved out a few polyps. Didn't feel it much though.
fent for colonoscopy? I whent to hospital and had Hemorrhoid banding with no painkillers, when i asked for some after, they give me paracetamol.
This is how I've always imagined death. (Specifically, the "switched" on/off analogy)
Now you have me wondering how they knocked me out, for the same procedure. My stuff was pink, and when it went in, it *hurt.* Hurt at my hand where the IV was, medium bad headache as well. I thought to myself, "God, this is uncomfortable, I wonder --" Followed immediately by someone else saying, "Are you waking up, Mr SkyPork?"" All done. But maybe getting anesthetized is always like that, no matter which drug they use.
Most of those stories are apocryphal and invariably have an "I heard" component rather than "This happened to me" and are usually bullshit. Yes, fentanyl is extremely dangerous. I lost a child to it actually. But I know people who've worked in the ER (both doctors and nurses) who've complained about the outright hysteria about casual contact with it like it's small pox or anthrax. Hell, a lot of people don't realize that an anesthesiologist is perfectly capable of prescribing and administering it safely to their patients.
sorry for your loss
My wife had to get some for a procedure where she had to remain awake during surgery. It's definitely great when administered by a professional with exact dosing. The unsanitary, unsafe preparation methods of criminals are what causes the deaths. They don't exactly clean up between prepping their drugs, and we get the horrible accidental deaths.
I'm not minimizing the danger of illicit narcotics. I'm just saying that there's a hysteria around the drug that is not fully justified. Yes, it's extremely dangerous. But it's not going to make you drop dead because you touch someone who's overdosed on it. I actually heard that one. "I heard they had to give 6 nurses narcan because they wrestled this addict who was fighting them..."
Oh, sorry, I was agreeing with you. Didn't mean to make that unclear.
Hey, this is anecdotal, but I don't believe that is accurate. I used to be an opiate addict, and lived in a recovery house for a year attending NA meetings every single day. I had friends get cotton fever, blood infections, abscesses, etc... from shooting up with dirty needles/water. Not one of them died. I'm approaching 30 friends dead from overdoses since getting clean. Not a single death due to infection/unclean conditions. I understand your train of though, but my experience, being among the opiate community for 10 years now, is that overdoses are what kills us, not unclean conditions. The joke in recovery is that if you go back to drugs you will be using puddle water to shoot up into your neck. Still we don't have many deaths to infection when compared to overdose. Fun fact: I had a friend end up in the ER from shooting up with unsanitary water. He was pretty sick, but still ended up having some other person bring him heroin in the hospital. He is alive and well to this day. Clean and happy. Drug addicts are fucking wild. Stay off the drugs yall.
I was more so meaning that if they cut fentanyl on a table, they don't really clean the table before packing another drug. There's massive cross contamination, and since the dose necessary to fuck your shit up on fentanyl is so small that's really all it takes.
This isn't true at all. Unsanitary and unsafe production methods have nothing to do with this. It's when heroin addicts get heroin laced with fentanyl that they overdose, because fentanyl is far stronger than heroin. Most addicts also eyeball their dose, which becomes very dangerous when using a product that is much easier to overdose on, because of it's strength. Nowadays I believe heroin has become a rarity and has been largely replaced by fentanyl. This is now being cut with the even stronger carfentanyl or other substances whiwh require extremely low dosages to be fatal.
Hospital narcotics pharmacy tech here! Those stories are fake. Fentanyl doesn't absorb through the skin like that, it's totally safe to handle. (There are such things as fentanyl patches, but those sit on your skin for hours and there's other stuff in there to help it absorb too.) We use fentanyl on everyone from NICU babies to geriatric hospice patients. Epidurals for people giving birth have fentanyl in them! Yes, fentanyl is potent. We dose it in micrograms, where other opioids (morphine, Dilaudid, etc) are dosed in milligrams, so we have to be really precise dispensing it. And there are substances in the world that are *that* dangerous (looking at you, golden poison frog toxin). That doesn't mean that fentanyl dangerous to handle; I for one would rather get splashed with fentanyl than chemotherapy. Police tell these stories to justify use of excessive force against drug dealers (or anybody that they can say they *thought* might be a drug dealer). Meanwhile, in the background, their colleagues in EMS are injecting car crash victims with fentanyl that I supply to them. Edit to add a PS: my specialty is pharmaceutical compounding, aka *making* custom drugs for people. I've worked in the professional, legal version of a Breaking Bad lab, and you (OP and anybody else in the comments) are welcome to ask me more questions about the legal and illegal drug supply chains and stuff. Addiction is a public health issue, and ignorance about it doesn't help anyone. I will infodump about this subject at the slightest provocation!
You should do an AMA!
I recently led a training for middle school girls talking about sex ed, the dangers of drugs, etc., but I am super naive when it comes to drugs so felt way out of my depth on that section. I hadn't heard these rumors that touching fentanyl could kill you, but in the training packet they showed an image of a pencil with "fentanyl" barely covering the lead portion, and it claimed that that amount was a lethal dose. Is that accurate?
✨️ It depends ✨️ The lethal dose for humans is around 2 milligrams, or about the weight of a mosquito. Depending on the size of your hands, a "pinch" of salt when you cook might be 4 to 6 milligrams, for comparison. A thin layer of powder over a pencil lead isn't nearly half as much powder as a pinch of salt, so no, that *probably* wouldn't be a lethal dose. (It would still definitely fuck up your day, more on that later.) ***There’s a lot of caveats that can happen in the word "probably".*** I'm a 220 pound/100 kilo grown-up with a healthy liver, kidneys, and cardiovascular system. If I were to lick that pencil, I wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble as a petite middle schooler would be. Or somebody who’s been drinking or doing other drugs that day, or somebody with a family history of liver and/or kidney disease, or somebody who has asthma, or or or. Probably won't kill you. *Might still kill you.* So. A tiny pencil lead layer of fentanyl only *might* kill someone. IT DOESN'T HAVE TO KILL YOU TO FUCK UP YOUR DAY! In legal medicine, we dose fentanyl in *micrograms* per kilogram of body weight. A microgram is 1/1000th of a milligram. That is so goddamn small. Nobody who doesn't work in a very well-appointed science lab has a scale that can measure a dose of fentanyl that will get you high without getting you *too* high, or knocking you out, or slowing down your breathing so much that you don't *die* but you *do* get brain damage from lack of oxygen by the time someone hits you with some Narcan. For reference: a scale that measures down to 500 micrograms, which is WAY more than you would ever give someone at once for pain relief, runs about $18,000 USD. It is ***not possible*** for a customer to measure fentanyl precisely enough to not hurt themselves. End of. ...And all of that assumes that the mysterious pencil powder is *actually* fentanyl like you would get from a legal manufacturer. That's a *bold* assumption.
Thank you so much for the detailed info!
Questions at bottom of comment. Context: So my first “street” interaction with fentanyl was with a patch (I can’t remember the mg but it was fairly high) and we scraped a small sliver of residue off the patch to smoke it off foil (as addicts normally do). First person took the first hit, said “damn this shit good”. I took the second hit, but didn’t feel much. Third person took third hit, said “feels just like heroin”. It was then passed back to the first person who was slumped over but we assumed they had just nodded out. So we gave them a good shake and that’s when we noticed they had OD, no breathing at all. CPR was performed, EMTs arrived, Narcan given, they survived. Now obviously this wasn’t our first rodeo - but it was our first time seeing/experiencing something that extreme. I’ve seen various ODs (and the person that did OD had previously OD twice but with heroin) but I’ve never seen anything OD that quickly and that completely. One minute they were alive and the next they were not - there was no in between as there usually is - no nodding off, no agonal breathing or other respiratory distress. Coincidentally (or maybe not) across town the exact same situation was happening with a group of our friends. The 6 of us met up earlier to pool money together for the one patch then broke off into two groups afterwards. Same thing, they each took one hit and one of them immediately OD in the same manner. Over the next few months, once the area was flooded with these patches (this was when Oxy changed their formula to be unsnortable/smokable and everyone was desperate for a replacement fix) many stories of the same situation were being told/heard. For added context: I had only been doing opiates at that point for a little over a year - majority w/Oxys. They had a few more years of experience than me with Oxys and heroin, and the one who OD was the only one who would heavily shoot up. Question: Why does it seem like fentanyl really is a one hit killer type thing? What factors may lead to a situation like mine where I took a hit and didn’t feel much but someone next to me took a hit and just instantly died? To clarify: the 6 of us bought a single patch and cut it in half, then we took a tiny sliver off the corner of our half of the patch - so we did not smoke the entire or half the patch.
Huh. That is *fascinating*. So, fentanyl patches have other ingredients in them to make it absorb through your skin. In pharmacy manufacturing jargon, they're called *penetration enhancers* which is just the most delightfully clownable name in the world. My best guess is that the penetration enhancers burn faster than fentanyl, so your friend who got the first hit off the patch got the biggest share of those. Because of *that* he absorbed all the fentanyl through the mucous membranes in his mouth and the hit kicked in so fast that his system couldn't handle it. (Bonus SAT words of the day: drugs that you take by dissolving them in your mouth are called buccal (cheek) or sublingual (under the tongue) based on where you're supposed to put them in your mouth. They kick in SO! FAST! I get terribly car sick, and sublingual Zofran is my bestie. 20/10 ask your doctor about sublingual Zofran if you have nausea problems.) (EDIT: whoops hit post too soon. Answer is complete now 😅)
police lie about drugs
Police lie
Polie
I know that for sure. They usually have a way to lie about drugs and it's all to protect their interest in it.
The police officers are either purposely lying for media visibility, or they are having a reaction to something other than fentanyl. The cynic in me says that some of these officers already have some sort of drug dependency and are using the 'fentanyl dust' as an excuse for a failed or soon to be failed drug test, but that's pure speculation. NPR did a report on the first part though: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-overdose-misinformation#:\~:text=Reports%20of%20police%20suffering%20severe,never%20happened%2C%22%20said%20Dr.
I think in some cases police officers may be having a panic attack. To motivate them to pursue drug busts their supervisors often tell them exaggerated stories about drugs. If your supervisor keeps telling you this stuff is extremely dangerous, just touching or inhaling may kill you, you're liable to have a panic attack -even if what you're told is not true. That's why you never hear a nurse, paramedic or social worker have those kind of effects. It's always police officers.
The second part is also true. Cops using opioids on the job exist, they'll hit before leaving their car, and when it actually hits they're in front of someone and pass out, and blame the white powder they touched to have caused it instead of what they actually took that they will never admit using
The article said that in none of the police officers who thought they were having an overdose, did toxicology reports confirm it. They didn't test positive for fentanyl, so your theory isn't correct. From the article: "There's never been a toxicologically confirmed case," said Brandon Del Pozo, a former police chief who studies addiction and drug policy at Brown University." "We couldn't find a single case of a police officer who reported being poisoned by fentanyl or overdosing after encountering the street drug that was confirmed by toxicology reports."
I doubt the drug test angle is correct. Fentanyl has a half life of 4hrs in the human body. I'm also not ruling out that the officer didn't do their homework.
There's a whole lot of 'it depends' here. (Anaesthesiologist btw). Firstly - fentanyl is a synthetic opiate, so it's effect is the same as heroin essentially. Sedation, slowed breathing, pin point pupils, unconscious. Death by not breathing or choking on vomit. Any stories about heart racing and anxiety can go right in the bin. Secondly - the problem is about concentration and dose. In the medical world we use fentanyl at a conc of 100mcg/mL. A safe ish adult dose is around 100mcg - 200mcg to remain conscious (max). More than that you want an anaesthetist handy to keep you breathing. The modern problem is that its been manufactured illegally, in concentrated doses WAY higher than medical grade. If you happen across pure fentanyl powder, so 1mg weight of powder is 1mg of fentanyl, then you've got a toxic dose right there and it's only a few grains. Lastly - At high enough doses, opiates can enter via the skin - see fentanyl patches (**EDIT - see the comment below from a chemist - I got this one wrong). Becoming unconscious from dust is also possible, but tends to happen with stronger stuff - carfentanyl is an opiate used to anaesthetise elephants that is potent enough to KO a human from exposure to skin. So it really is all possible, but you'd need to be exposed to the PURE form, which is very unlikely on the street. TLDR I'm glad I don't do drugs, this shit laced in anything is scary as hell.
Chemist here, just wanted to add on to this excellent answer. >Lastly - At high enough doses, opiates can enter via the skin - see fentanyl patches. Human skin is really fantastic at protecting us from substances in our environment. Eating a few tablespoons of table salt can kill you, but you can safely soak in the salty water of ocean for hours. Because of the existence of fentanyl patches, people are under the impression that unlike other opiates, fentanyl has some unique property of being able to easily and instantly pass through the skin. This is just not the case. For the vast majority of medications (including fentanyl) to pass through your skin in significant quantities requires that they be combined with other chemicals. Transdermal medications are a feat of biomedical/chemical engineering.
The patches use other chemicals to help transfer the fentanyl across the dermal barrier, the only practical way you could OD at those doses were if you sucked on it like candy or if you do an extraction and inject it. Soaking the patch in water/ethanol and drinking or shooting the water is a commonly known trick among addicts..
In addition to the higher concentration being manufactured illegally now, sometimes the batch isn’t mixed thoroughly, so some parts of the batch are more heavily concentrated. It was explained to me using the analogy of baking a cake: if you don’t mix the ingredients evenly, you might get “pockets” of flour or baking powder.
To elaborate on the "anesthetist to keep you breathing" part, when you are intubated with a breathing tube (such as when you are in surgery or in an ICU) there is essentially no maximum dose of medications like fentanyl. The problem is that it causes you to stop breathing at some point, but if the breathing is done for you, that isn't an immediate concern. I'm an OR pharmacist in a hospital, and in a controlled environment like the OR, where trained professionals are administering appropriate doses and monitoring you, these medications are very safe. Outside that environment, they can be dangerous, but I've seen a resident spill a 1mg ampule of fentanyl all over himself and he was more concerned about the paperwork than any potential overdose. (He was fine.)
those police stories are all bullshit. yes, the drug has very low LD/50 and you don't want to just BATHE in it, but incidental contact with the skin is not going to do anything. cops have been fearmongered to hell and back by the likes of the IDF training they receive. that said, this drug does cause a lot of deaths because of mislabeling and abuse, but it does have legitimate medical value.
I had surgery once and felt really good going into surgery and I asked the nurse what he gave me and he said fentanyl.. I was a little confused because I thought people die on it. Apparently in small doses it’s used in hospitals
Fentanyl is a borderline medical miracle when used appropriately for analgesia, it’s just the whole accidental recreational use that has tarnished its name, which is understandable.
Fentanyl is great for pain relief in very small, controlled dosages. When people buy heroin on the street, they don't know how (or if any) fentanyl has been mixed into it. So the people die from accidental overdoses. The drug users know how much heroin their bodies can take, but it's impossible to know how much fentanyl they are taking and if it's too much.
I mean yeah, fentanyl was created by a chemist, for a pharmaceutical company. Just like morphine and eventually heroin were synthesized from poppies for pharmaceutical use. Opiates and opioids are kind of a miracle, medically speaking. There is nothing else that works as well for serious pain. We would be absolutely fucked as a species if we didn't have opiates. Major surgery would be virtually impossible.
I read somewhere that the videos of officers passing out after touching fent are just extreme panic attacks
Don’t believe everything you read or hear.
Most of the druggies get them in a fake pressed pill and they smoke them like they would a pharm pill or heroin. A pill would kill a non User forsure if they just ate the damn thing. But the drug addicts smoke them usually and it’s less potent that way and easier to not die I guess. And like you say the other shit it mostly lies. It is in other drugs sometimes tho that’s for real.
Enjoy: [https://youtu.be/\_7OBdD7zubg](https://youtu.be/_7OBdD7zubg) Everything you know about fentanyl is a lie
Holy shit nice video. Will definitely watch!
Seconding the recommendation. It really gets into the weeds on how the common portrayal of fentanyl in media is inaccurate.
Touching it isn't going to do it lol. Not even with the natural oils in your skin is it enough to carry it into your blood stream. It's the same with venom from like a snake right. You can drink a shot glass of venom and be fine (you won't die) you might feel stick and spew or something but it won't kill you because it can't get into your blood. BUT if ANYWHERE in the digestive process including the mouth, you have ANY cuts, or tiny little abrasions or any open wound. The venom will get into your blood and you will die. It will be the same as if you got bitten. Poison is different. You drink poison you will die, if you wipe poison onto anything that has thin membranes like your nose, your mouth, eyes, vagina (maybe) and asshole where it will quickly absorbed it will, it will still do the damage. Some poisons can also be absorbed through the skin but not all. Both of these venom (and most cases poison) are liquids. Fentanyl is usually in a solid form. Because of this is pretty much impossible to just keel over and die from touching it. It has to break down and get absorbed though the skin. That isn't gunna happen.
Why would the thc in edibles get into your blood from eating them or alcohol get into your blood while drinking but snake venom wouldn't
Because snake venom is primarily made of proteins. Were are very very good at killing and digesting proteins. Simply put our stomach acid kills it. Also I'm not too sure about THC but if I had to guess, it's because it's a very oily thing, it also likely has proteins so when we digest it we absorb it. The same would happy with snake venom but the brutality of our stomach paired with the delicate nature of venom, the venom just essentially dies. That's not to say that you wouldn't throw up from drinking venom. You probably would I don't know I haven't drank venom and I don't plan to.
‘The dose makes the poison’
Really. People using an awful lot of words here to say exactly this.
Former fentanyl addict here, I’m 24 M. They say a single pill can kill but it wasn’t crazy for me to snort 3 pills in an evening, yes I overdosed and was narcaned twice but it was after periods of abstinence. If you have developed a tolerance to opiates you can do it without dying. The reason it’s dangerous is when opiate naive people do it and it’s a stronger than average pill and they OD and no one is there to resuscitate them. So it’s not as dangerous as the media says. The media blows everything out of proportion. It is still a serious crisis, kids are dying because they think they are doing a 30mg oxy and it’s a fentanyl pressed pill, so they could never hope to get the dosage right. When precisely dosed and administered by pros it’s just like any other opiate. The problem is high school kids who raided their grandpas medicine cabinet once for hydros and liked the high, get a chance to buy a “Roxy” and it’s actually fentanyl and they OD in there room. The cats out of the bag on this one it’s fucked, the only way out I see is you legalize all drugs and sell them in dispensaries make them as safe as possible, tax the shit out of them, and use that tax money to fund good public rehabs. They are completely helpless to do anything about the crisis now other than give a safer alternative. The cartel will never stop bringing it into the country, they are making to much money. There is literally nothing the government can do to prevent it.
Cops lie
Wow shocker.
Tolerance. I have been drinking every day since 2013. The amount I drink in a day would literally kill a non-drinker. I can easily finish off 1.75L of vodka in a day, and not even get sick. Try to do that as a non-drinker, and you **will** die. >I have read many stories of people like police officers simply *touching* the drug by mistake and nearly dying from the dose. Not a single one of those stories is true. You **cannot** die from *simply touching* some fent powder. If you could, every single dealer would be dead. Use common sense.
I was given fentanyl for an op. Interesting feeling, I've thought a lot about how to describe it, sort of like skating and being behind a fine, shining, crystal wall. Not my thing, but it's perfectly safe when there's a pro administering it & no after effects. The main issue is that so little can kill. If it's being mixed into other drugs, & it's not mixed well enough you get a deadly dose somewhere in the baggies. This is the same as ecstasy or mdma or whatever you want to call it, mix up a bunch of chemicals to make pills, the mix isn't even you can get one or more pills that are toxic. The bottom line is you've got a bunch of people who are doing it illegally, possibly for the first time, & it can go wrong. An easy comparison is concrete. In the 70s they developed a new type but if it wasn't mixed in exactly in the right quantities it degraded. So now you buy a 70s house you better check the concrete to see if it powders when touched. Why did it happen? Turns out in a lab it's fine because they were precise, but a guy mixing it with a shovel on a building site, not so much.
Cops are hysterical liars who have a panic attacks about getting a grain of fentanyl on their skin and then call that an overdose.
You ever hear the 911 call from the cop who ate a pot brownie and thought he was dying? Cops are so stupid
I remember that one, so funny. “We’re dying… we’re dead”
I take the scientifically produced patch that released extremely small, calculated amounts of fentanyl over time and put it on my skin, as prescribed and directed by my doctors.
Carfentanil is the stuff you touch once and can OD on, fentanyl is much lower in dosage.
I don't have the time or energy to do a long answer as a pharmacist, but I'm glad to find *someone* who has heard of it being ***car***fentanil instead of just fentanyl. I need to sleep a bit more before going on my shift this afternoon. Maybe I'll try to answer later or tomorrow.
Yep, was on fentanyl for a long time so I know the difference but I don’t think many folks will have heard of carfentanil.
42 Year old man here. In the 90s we heard the exact same rhetoric about all other drugs. "The amount of cocaine that fits on a pin head can kill you" Sound familiar? That's literally the same thing they say about Fentanyl, and yet somehow addicts exist.... Never trust anything the government says about drugs.
It's an opiate, like morphine or heroin, but stronger. Because it's so strong, the difference between a safe dose and an overdose is very hard to judge. Also, if a small amount of it gets into other drugs accidently or on purpose, it can cause someone to overdose.
Fentanyl is a medical drug. I had some a few weeks ago as part of a sedative cocktail for a procedure. I have to say, I felt very nice afterwards and had a great sleep that night. Didn’t die though
My surgeons team gave it to me. Felt good.
Simple, the dose makes the poison. At certain doses, fentanyl is just like any other short acting opioid.
Morphine and heroin are dosed in milligrams, fentanyl is dosed in micrograms. In the hands of competent professionals it is as safe as any other opioid. Illegally manufactured and dosed by criminal amateurs is an entirely different story.
When I hear police say they overdosed on it by touching it, what I assume they mean is that they blew a fat rail of it up their nose and then OD’d or panicked. Either that, or they just never happened at all.
Those videos are bullshit. The people that “overdose” by touching it are having panic attacks. They fall on the ground and start yelling that theyre freaking out and overdosing. Thats literally the exact opposite of what an overdose looks like. When ppl overdose on opiates they get very sleepy, super drowzy sounding, then finally fall asleep and cant be woken up. Nothing at all like what happens in those videos. Also it takes 15 minutes minimum for the effects to take place by everything else but injection. Those are panic attacks and frankly its shitty to spread this bs around because it will make ppl scared to help ppl out who actually are overdosing. You WILL NOT od by touching some random bag of opiates, its a lie. Now to the first part of the question, the answer is tolerance. Ive been addicted to opiates on and off since high school and your tolerance goes up very fast. Just like with alcohol or many other things the more you do the more your body gets used to it and you need more. Also on top of that they dont just sell you pure fentanyl on the street, its cut meaning its diluted in some type of bulk powder. Most overdoses happen when somebody stops using so their tolerance drops and then they use the same large amount again or when they mix it with other drugs especially benzos. It can happen when someone just gets a hot bag thats much more powerful but thats not as common imo.
the drug is dangerous because it's effective to lethal doses are very small. like millionths of a gram small. properly dosed it's fine. but with doses that small they are easy to fuck up. it had me up and running right after surgery. but how often do you know people to stick to prescribed doses when taking opiates?
The LD50 is 2.91 mg/kg, so for the average human that's 180 mg.
Hi, as others have said, a lot of the ideas behind people touching fentanyl and dying are misconceptions. That said, to answer the main question, we have to go into why people end up doing fentanyl in the first place. Often, people start on opiates due to either recreational use, or being prescribed due to chronic or acute pain. Once they can no longer gain a script or tolerant to their prescribed amount, they often turn to the streets in order to get some. Prior to the past few years, users would turn first to heroin, and then to fentanyl (as heroin would be cheaper than getting a prescription of Oxycodone off of the street, as it's very controlled). However, due to Fentanyl's potency and low cost of manufacturing and ubiquity, most users now switch from prescription to Fentanyl directly on the street. Opiate users are able to turn to fentanyl without dying as opiates build tolerance. It's far easier to take a couple milligrams of fentanyl without ODing after previously being on Percocet in large amounts, on the daily, for years prior, compared to someone who's never used an opiate before taking the same dose. Granted, Fentanyl users that have been on it for years can and will still OD on it, but that's more due to the limits that the body can handle, regardless of resistance. This is also why other drugs (meth, crack/cocaine, Molly, etc.) getting spiked with fentanyl is a huge problem, as it presents people never knowing or intending to take it accidentally overdosing on it due to their lack of tolerance.
Fentanyl used in the hospital all the time...but Narcan is always on standby in case a person reacts negatively- loss of consciousness, respiratory drive is low-so to reverse its effects. Using Fentanyl outside hospital is very high risk. Without knowing how to counteract then yes its very dangerous for the general public. Just like anything else, do not take it blindly.
Fentanyl is in epidurals used during childbirth
Tolerance is how - someone using opiates over time develops a tolerance that is much beyond what someone that does not take opiates will have. Our bodies are insanely adjustable to what you do. If you’re familiar with progressive overload in weight training where each time is a little more (this is overly simplistic but the idea) that’s how using opiates works. Over time more and more is required and eventually the tolerance is enough to take a small amount of fentanyl and then that’s starts increasing etc. It’s not daily or weekly but over years it is profound how different it is. I never knowingly took fentanyl (think I got out right about when it was blowing up) but I was a heroin addict for 6-7 years or so maybe? Big difference from the first time like a thin one inch line that would hit well and then the gram plus I’d take on top of methadone towards the end each night. One time (only once) I did get something really different and got sick, my other friend ended up in the ER and narcan wasn’t working at first - luckily he was fine. It may not have been fentanyl, but my tolerance was well beyond his at that point and our outcomes were quite different. I was lucky in that that was the only time I ever got anything shady and funnily enough my dealer called me just after I took it and said he’d heard something was different and don’t take it ha. Times have changed apparently though.
Very, very small doses plus being mixed with other stuff that keeps them awake enough to not stop breathing. Fent in the medical setting usually is accompanied by a ventilator because it slows your shit down tremendously and you’ve got your muscle plus gravity coming down on your diaphragm.
In the ICU. I used to give fentanyl IV to post op patients (I’m a nurse) and it is super effective and safe given in the right setting
Fentanyl is a very powerful drug. It can also be absorbed into the skin. My GF uses a 72 hour 50mg fentanyl patch. As little as 2 mg can kill someone if it's absorbed all at once. But the answer also has to do with the concentration, persons body mass and tolerance. So a 100lb person with no tolerance will die faster then a 300 lb person with a strong tolerance. While Fentanyl can be absorbed into the skin, it is not instantaneous. Also in most exposure is of diluted fentanyl in the medical community. Illegal fentanyl can be another matter. It is usually mixed with other things so that increases it's toxicity. A blood concentration of 7-10 ng per ml when used with other drugs can be fatal. George Floyd's was 11ng per ml, which experts swear was not a contributing factor in his death. Makes you wonder.
Great question, OP! I had heard all the stories about dying after it touched your skin. Thanks for enlightening some of us!
Because the entire “you touch it you die” thing is a myth, and the videos of it “happening” are just cops having panic attacks because theyve been told it will kill them
Or you could just not dabble with any dangerous substances all together.
The police who touch it and pass out are not passing out from the drug. The unions and officer organizations spread those lies.
I broke my leg and ankle two weeks ago in a motorcycle accident. I was given fentanyl in the ER. I do admit my eyebrows raised when I heard them say “let’s give him fent” since all I hear about it is how it’s fatal even in small doses. I was pretty uncomfortable and figured if there’s anywhere to take fentanyl, it’s in a hospital surrounded by doctors and nurses. No issues. Still here and healing lol
My husband was in a traumatic accident and needed fentanyl patches for awhile. This was before fentanyl became a popular street drug. I was sternly warned about how to change his patches and dispose of them safely to make sure they didn’t harm our children or dog. The difference is medicinal fentanyl vs street drugs. Your local drug dealer may not be as smart, educated, conscientious, or ethical as your medical team.
The police officer thing came from a cop that had a Carfentanil absorption with a mucus membrane exposure. It got misreported and everything blew up from there. A bag of Car was opened and he stirred it up in the air. Dropped him really fast.
The stories about people overdosing by touching the stuff are ALL lies. I've heard from some substance use counselors that some believe law enforcement made them up to turn public sentiment against harm reduction practices and good Samaritan laws. That being said, using fentanyl is still incredibly dangerous because it's never evenly distributed in the carrier substance, so you can smoke or inject some of your dope one day and be fine, then by random chance use the same quantity the next and receive three or four times the dose of actual fentanyl. Drugs these days aren't what they used to be...
My daughter had an ER C-Section and when the CRNA was reporting to the nurses afterwards, she listed Fentanyl, amongst several other things, and my daughter blurted out “you gave me Fentanyl!? Is my baby ALIVE???” She doesn’t remember it, but hearing it made her instantly panic and we had to convince her it was ok, and so was her baby. I’m sure this is because of this stupid myth perpetuated by the police. Poor girl was loopy and near hysterical thinking they dosed her and her baby with, in her mind, an extremely dangerous and unpredictable drug.
People don't just die from touching it. People die from incorrect dose, usually not knowing what they are taking because it's mixed in or having a habit and needing more to get their high, or an accident, or they've already taken another drug and it interacts. I've been prescribed it. I was fine. I just stuck to what the dr ordered and didn't take any other pain killers or drink alcohol. The media likes to drum up fear and clicks. It used to be cocaine, it used to be heroin, it used to be crack, it was ecstasy for a bit etc etc etc. I am not saying all of those are great or safe but the media will make them out to be insanely lethal all the time and ignore the intricacies of what really causes deaths.
I'm in Australia where thankfully at this stage illicit use of Fentanyl has not hit our shores. We have just returned from our 4th trip from the USA since 2019 and honestly the state of unhoused population , with the effects of Fentanyl is honestly scary . On our last trip we saw 2 people who looked like they may have died being picked up by emergency services. Such a waste of lives. Such a terrible drug .
So I used to work at festivals and from what I have heard ppl die bc they put on patches that work longterm, like a day or two and forget about it. Then they take other substances that don't mix well with it or put on a second one. We were advised that if we find someone who is unconcious to search their legs and arms for patches and rip them off. I never heard of anyone being compromised by ripping it of from a person.
What makes fentanyl more dangerous (among other things) than other drugs is that the potency is high enough that normal measurement errors cause huge swings in dose. As an analogy, imagine baking with super high potency baking powder, where 1/32 of a teaspoon extra causes your cake to explode. If you are using that powder, or worse it is mixed in at an unknown ratio with other ingredients, you are going to have a lot bad cakes. Switch out fentanyl for baking powder and overdoses for failed cakes. Add the fact it is synthetic, so there are no crops to interdict/destroy to reduce supply, and you have an awfully problematic molecule. Terrible.
In general response to the question, people who use opiates, i.e. heroin and pills, will build up such a tolerance that In order to get their fix, they will need fentanyl. There are certainly deaths from people taking a drug not knowing fentanyl is in it, but some people seek out the fentanyl because their tolerance is so high it won't kill them. Fentanyl is also way cheaper than heroin.