Alan Levinovitz

And so one, I'm just going to give one example of this.

Please do.

There was a New York Times piece recently, it was super fascinating, about 20 first responders went to a house in New Mexico where people had called in about an overdose.

When they arrived at the house, I think, I'm getting the numbers kind of wrong, but five people were unconscious, three of them were dead.

So terrifying situation.

And this was a fentanyl overdose.

So after that, 20 of the healthcare workers also became sick with symptoms of overdose.

And they were rushed to the hospital and they were decontaminated.

And the story was reported on.

It was a really crazy story.

And there was one paragraph where it was like, pharmacologists seem to agree that it's very unlikely that you can overdose on fentanyl from contact with it.

So one of the theories was that these first responders had gotten it from offering first aid to people.

But pharmacologically...

there's pretty unanimous agreement that it doesn't work like that.

And what turns out is that contact fentanyl poisoning is something that has been around in our culture, especially in law enforcement since about 2015, when a PSA went out to all police officers about how dangerous fentanyl was and like just touching it could kill you.

And so we have lots of law enforcement and healthcare workers who are going out every year.

There are stories like this of contact fentanyl overdoses and people saved by Narcan.

And there's a real taboo around acknowledging even the possibility that what's happening is that you walk into a house with three dead people on the ground and it's stuffy and it smells horrible and it's a terrifying place.

And you've heard stories about how fentanyl can kill you if you touch it.

Your heart's already racing.