Alan Levinovitz

You're in there.

You're like a first responder and there's three dead people.

Your nervous system is on red alert.

And then now something trips that and there's a cascade effect and you start experiencing physiological symptoms that look a lot like, but not exactly like, as many overdose experts point out, these overdoses, when we have them on camera and we have some, don't look like overdoses, typical overdoses.

They look like panic attacks.

Wow.

But reporting on that, honestly,

is almost impossible.

And I actually went to Maine to talk with this burly police officer, tattoos all over his arm, super nice guy.

He was one of the people who had his life saved after a contact fentanyl overdose.

And he was like, look, man, I cut myself, I cut my leg with a chainsaw and I drove myself to the hospital.

There is no way that what I had was a panic attack.

I've been in a million different situations way worse than this.

And again,

I don't know what happened to him as an individual.

What my book is about is not what happened to him.

What my book is about is how our current cultural context makes it almost impossible to discuss things like contact fentanyl poisoning because of the implications of a psychogenic or psychological element of what happens to those people.

And one of the things that I was saying to you before is that even in saying the word psychogenic or psychological,

Someone's going to clip this and be like, look, Levinowitz thinks that it's all in our heads, right?

This goes back to the Wired article at the very beginning.