News Brief: A Quantitative Analysis of US Media’s Fentanyl Panic and How It Kills
Citations Needed | August 7, 2024 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes, and today we are thrilled to have back on the show friend of the pod, Zach Siegel, journalist, researcher, writer living in the great city of Chicago.
Adam: And Senior Drug War correspondent for Citations Needed.
Nima: That’s right. Zach’s writing on public health, mental health, addiction, drug policy, and criminal justice has been featured in news outlets and magazines all over, such as the New York Times, Harpers, the Atlantic, Slate, Wired, The Nation, Scientific American, the New Republic, New York Magazine, Vulture, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other places. He writes a newsletter at ZachSiegel.Substack.com, which you should absolutely subscribe to. And you can follow him on the website I’ll only refer to as Twitter @ZachWritesStuff. Zach, thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed.
Zach Siegel: Hey, hey. Thanks for the lovely intro.
Adam: Yeah, yeah. That was one of the best ones we’ve ever done. I gotta be honest.
Zach Siegel: Nailed it.
Adam: That was a Jack Reacher-level resume.
Nima: That’s right, he’ll blend in. You’ll never see him again.
Adam: Two tours in Afghanistan.
Nima: With any luck. Basically, what I’m saying is that Zach Siegel has a growl already. His latest research, though, which is the reason we invited him back onto Citations Needed, was published at the end of May by the Center for Just Journalism in a report entitled “Fentanyl Exposure: Myths, Misconceptions, and the Media.” And as you can imagine, that is extremely our shit. Zach authored the report alongside contributors Laura Bennett, Bella Horton, and Andrew Ian Stolbach.
Adam: Yeah. So just to get us kicked off here, excellent, excellent report. You’ve been following this for many years, so it’s good to have it all in one place, one thorough debunking. Your title, “Fentanyl Exposure: Myths, Misconceptions, and the Media,” is very gentle. It’s very polite. I like it. It’s very academic, but it’s a quite scathing report, not in tone or even in language, but in data. And what your findings show, it’s kind of–
Nima: In substance. Scathing in substance.
Adam: Scathing in substance. So I want to begin by talking about the kind of big picture. Now, obviously there’s been this kind of fentanyl exposure, fentanyl poisoning cops, media narrative for six-plus years as you write. Obviously, there’s a lot of bullshit in media. That’s what the whole point of our show is. But I can’t think of an example where there’s been a, such a gap between the universal scientific consensus, like, not even sort of a debatable thing, but universal scientific consensus with some weird freaks from like places that deny climate change, like Heritage Foundation or Manhattan Institute, but mostly, like, 99% of scientists agree that fentanyl exposure vis a vis proximity or the skin, is literally impossible, versus a media narrative that consistently repeats the police and politicians saying that not only is it possible, but has in fact happened, and is in fact hospitalized or injured someone.
Nima: It’s the Drug War version of Havana Syndrome.
Adam: Right. I would say there’s a little more evidence for Havana Syndrome than there is this, but has many of the similar elements, right? So I want to begin by talking about, obviously, this is something that can drive one mad who sort of sees this manifest gap between reality and what’s being covered by the media. And this is not a small thing. It’s extremely common, as your report documents. I want to sort of begin by talking about, begin by talking about, just to kind of update our listeners about what the basic gap between this reality is and how media has covered this over the past six, seven years.
Zach Siegel: Yeah, I think the best place to start is kind of like the origin of fentanyl exposure as a concept, and it really came into being in a five-minute-long video distributed by the DEA. I believe this was in 2016. This video has since been deleted off of the DEA’s website, but you can still find it at, like, DOJ.gov, they haven’t deleted it yet. But basically, this video claimed, and this is DEA talking heads, the kind of administrator, the director, they’re in uniform. And they’re saying, you know, to the camera, that any exposure to fentanyl to very small amounts, the equivalent of a few grains of sand, can kill you. Those are their words. And then there’s a press release accompanying this video, and this press release is also deleted from the DEA’s website.
Nima: Always a good sign.
Zach Siegel: Yeah, and, but you know, all this stuff is on the Internet Archive, so you know, anyone listening, your trail of digital bullshit, lives forever, and anyone can find it.
Nima: Lives on. [Laughs]
Zach Siegel: Lives on. And so the press release, kind of elaborates on the nebulous word “exposure.” That’s kind of what all this comes down to. What do they mean by exposure? And they say in the press release, and also in the video, that just touching fentanyl, or accidentally, you know, getting some on you during policing activity or giving a field test of the substance can result in rapid absorption through the skin. So, like, that’s the central claim here, that fentanyl has this skin absorption property, and that makes the job of policing super duper dangerous during what we’re living through right now, which is an explosion of synthetic opioids and fentanyl and fentanyl analogs taking over the drug supply. So any white powder now could potentially kill police, is what they’re told.
Nima: Right. Just by touching it you can, like, rapidly, OD, if not worse.
Zach Siegel: Yeah. And you know, this isn’t like encountering bricks of fentanyl. They’re talking about like a Splenda sugar packet’s worth of powder fentanyl. Like that’s enough to cause a fully grown human to hit the deck and overdose.
Adam: And to be clear, that is absolutely not true.
Zach Siegel: None of that’s true. That’s the big takeaway here. [Laughs]
Adam: So of the cases that have allegedly happened, give us a sense of, obviously, people have seen viral videos of police suffocating, having sort of, what you argue is almost certainly either panic attacks, or police, in some cases, are just doing fentanyl themselves and saying, Oh, I was exposed.
Nima: [Laughs] Right. There is that. So, yeah, I guess, Zach, can you kind of unpack the term you use in the report, the “nocebo effect?”
Zach Siegel: Yeah, it’s the exact opposite of the placebo effect, which is, you know, we all know, you take a sugar pill, and if you expect that pill to produce some beneficial effect, whatever it may be, you’ll kind of feel good. You’ll feel a little buzz or something. But it was a placebo. It didn’t do anything. It was just your mind producing the result that you’re primed for, and nocebo just cuts in the other direction. If you take something that you think is going to be harmful and injurious, then you will feel that. And it’s basically what we’re saying here is, the mind is very, very powerful, and your beliefs, what you’re primed to believe, all of this can cause physiological effects. And psychologists nowadays, instead of saying this is mass hysteria, they say it’s a conversion disorder, or it’s a mass psychogenic illness. You know, you mentioned Havana Syndrome, arguably another mass psychogenic illness. And like, kind of a hallmark of these things is that the pattern plays out among a very specific population, or group of people in a specific context. And the dead giveaway here is that the only people claiming to be exposed to fentanyl are police officers. It doesn’t happen to anyone else, which doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make sense.
Nima: So let’s actually dig into the data here and see how the media has consistently fallen down on this. Your research again, which has recently been published in the report “Fentanyl Exposure: Myths, Misconceptions, and the Media” from the Center for Just Journalism, analyzed 326 articles between January 2018 and May 2023, and found that almost 88% expressed zero doubt at all about police claims. No skepticism with regard to so-called fentanyl exposure. And so, look, 88%, that is beyond overwhelming, kind of a scandal in its own right, with local news being worse culprits than national news, but not by that much. Zach, can you please talk about these findings, and kind of, as you did this research, were you surprised at actually how bad it was? I know that you’ve been covering this for many years. You’ve been on the show before, talking about fentanyl, Halloween scares and whatnot, but doing the actual, like, media analysis here, what surprised you the most?
Zach Siegel: Yeah, I’ll definitely start with that question. Like, this is about as bad as I suspected. And before this analysis, I knew it was bad. I have Google News filters and I’m constantly looking at the local news TV package from somewhere in Tennessee or somewhere in Kansas City. There’s just so much, kind of ABC, CBS, Sinclair, video, you know, news packages out there kind of doing this stuff. But, like, I think it was just very clarifying, and frankly staggering, to see five years’ worth of news articles quantified in this very blunt, plain-as-day way, where there is no gray area. The coverage is just massively, massively wrong. Hundreds of articles just outright bogus. And I can go into some of the examples of that. Basically, there’s many variables we were looking for in the analysis. And so, like you said, 88% had no skepticism, expressed no doubt whatsoever. 252 articles out of 326 only quoted police sources, and in total, only 35 articles also quoted a medical expert. So that gives you a very–
Nima: Did you say only 35?
Zach Siegel: Only 35. [Laughs] Pretty staggering, right? The idea that there’s just a semblance of balance here is just totally out the window. This is one-sided reporting, dead on. 168 articles listed skin absorption as the primary route of exposure. And toxicologists and clinicians and medical experts say that’s just not how fentanyl works. 82 articles listed the primary symptom as lightheadedness. That’s not really a symptom of an opioid overdose. Other articles listed fainting, confusion, dizziness. These are, again, are just not really symptoms when you’re overdosing on fentanyl. The primary symptom is respiratory depression. Like, severe respiratory depression. Your breaths are very, very slight and shallow. That is an opioid overdose.
Nima: Which is the opposite of what so many of these cops say that they have, like, heavy breathing.
Zach Siegel: Yes.
Nima: Which is much more like a panic attack.
Zach Siegel: Yeah, they have all the hallmark symptoms of a panic attack, which, don’t get me wrong, that is not fun. That’s a very traumatizing, bad experience, but it is not fatal, and it is not being caused by an opioid.
Nima: And it’s also born of what the media is kind of stirring up.
Adam: It’s a feedback loop, right?
Nima: Exactly. It’s a feedback loop.
Zach Siegel: Yeah. And let’s see. Another thing about 85% of articles did not mention, like any toxicological or forensic testing or analysis of the substance of any kind. And that’s also very, very crucial, the powdery substances that police are handling. For all we know, it could be powdered sugar. There’s no actual evidence that the substance in question is even fentanyl in a lot of these cases.
Adam: I want to talk a little bit about what the stakes are. Because, I mean, I think people see this, you know, obviously others have made fun of it. John Oliver did a quick mention of this a couple years ago, and it’s kind of, to some extent, it’s played for laughs. And, you know, these images, these viral videos of cops suffocating on the floor or breathing heavily or having a panic attack, and it can be kind of funny, and you know, to some extent it is, because it’s obviously absurd, and there’s a kind of pathological self-victimization and police culture that this is kind of a perverse parody of, like they’re under constant siege by everything at all times. And even, like left out sugar packets are–
Nima: Looking at, like, a white powder, well, deadly all of a sudden. [Laughs] Yeah.
Adam: Right. Even though, of course, there’s, it’s not even the top 20 most dangerous jobs. But I want to talk about what the stakes are. So what does this panic do to actually harm policy, harm the people with substance use disorders, and how does it sort of orient the public’s mind to how we deal with the fentanyl crisis, which is, again, like you said, is very real. How do we allocate our resources and our empathy?
Zach Siegel: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s sort of the crux of this, and it is a bit of a hard line to walk. There actually, truly is a very dangerous and lethal problem emanating from the use of fentanyl in this country. And I think that this particular story, this panic, you know, hundreds and hundreds of articles out about police officers being the victims of fentanyl is just such a distortion of what’s actually happening in the world that we’re living in, and the major harms caused by fentanyl are happening to the people using it. That’s the most serious and direct harm. It comes from injecting and smoking and snorting fentanyl. And because of fentanyl’s actual deadly properties, it is very rapid-acting. That means there’s a very short window for any rescue or any aid or like using Naloxone, you don’t have a lot of time, and so like any delay in putting on hazmat gear or gloves or doing all of this kind of theater about the risk of fentanyl, that causes actual delay, and that delay could be very deadly.
Adam: No doubt has been deadly. I mean, this is maybe a stupid question, but have any cops claimed, have any police departments ever claimed that a specific person has ever died from fentanyl exposure? And if not, why not? I mean, they’re always almost died or they’re in the hospital. Seriously, no one’s died from this.
Zach Siegel: I mean, there are some really bizarre and, I think, tragic and sad cases out there where if a police officer maybe did die from an actual fentanyl overdose, it might be kind of like, retconned as a case of fentanyl exposure. They were just using it.
Adam: Is there any sense, and I forgive me for asking you to speculate, but is there any sense of how often that happens? Because I know that a lot of people, when they hear these stories, they’re like, Oh, yeah, they were just using the substance they found, and that substance had fentanyl in it.
Zach Siegel: I’m only aware of, like, one case, and I saw it, a police officer sent me the case. It’s on, like, a memorial, kind of police foundation website or something. That’s the only one I know of. I’m sure there’s more. And the story went that the officer was working a case and, you know, touched or was exposed to the substance, went home, and was found dead from a fentanyl overdose, and it was made out to be some kind of exposure. And I don’t know how often that’s happening.
Nima: So, as you’ve noted as well, Zach, this kind of pseudoscience about exposure is also informing policy. That’s another piece of the tragedy here, and you write in the report, “Suspects accused of causing exposure are being charged with assaulting a police officer, and states are passing new laws that criminalize those alleged to have caused exposure.” So how would this actually play out in a courtroom? Has this happened yet? What kind of policies are being informed here? Basically taking a passive, You’re responsible for exposing this police officer to this thing, thereby causing this terrible reaction, which already we know is not how this works, but these media reports and the police press releases, and the kind of consistency of this with, as you’ve said, zero skepticism, is informing policies that now are kind of doubling back into the criminal legal system. So to what extent is this happening, and how are lawmakers also citing these erroneous media reports to justify passing these laws in the first place?
Zach Siegel: Yeah, so there were several articles that mentioned assault on a police officer or reckless endangerment, and that basically it’s like considering fentanyl in these cases as a weapon, and the person, you know, allegedly blowing powder in the officer’s face, trying to cause them to overdose, or they’re “tampering with evidence” and trying to ditch the powder, and it gets all over themselves and gets all over the police officer. There’s just cases where all of this behavior gets written down and cited as assault and trying to cause injury to a police officer. There’s multiple cases where people have been tried and convicted or they pled guilty to assaulting a police officer with fentanyl, and in those cases, the officer had some kind of reaction, and that gets tacked on as an enhancement to what have already been pretty harsh drug charges. So that’s one instance, and then several states in this most recent legislative session actually tried to pass laws formalizing the criminal fentanyl exposure penalty. North Dakota is an interesting case. Their state senate, by one vote, struck the bill down, and that was because I think there was direct intervention, people from physicians’ groups and even from policing and law enforcement, they really stepped in and was like, No, no, this is not happening. This is not real.
Nima: But it was still just by one vote.
Zach Siegel: Yeah, by one vote. It could have very easily happened. Florida’s legislature did pass a fentanyl exposure law, and that hearing was really tense, and a police officer gave this extended testimony about their supposed overdose. And then when Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, signed the bill into law, he said, If you have drugs in your possession and you lie, and then an officer gets exposed, we’re going to throw the book at you, and we’re going to hold you accountable for harming police, police officers and so it, I think everyone, probably the governor, a lot of people who voted on this, probably know that this isn’t actually happening. And it just gets back to the politics of this is that supporting the police is very, let’s say, politically useful for a guy like Ron DeSantis, and they don’t care if it’s real or not, they’re going to look good signing this bill into law that protects police officers and punishes criminals.
Adam: Yeah, because there’s the evergreen question on this show of stupid or cynical, right? Is somebody genuinely believing their own bullshit, or are they lying knowingly because it suits their political interests? And typically, this is kind of a, this is kind of a 50/50, thing. I think in this case, it really depends on who the actor is. I think you’re probably right. Most police officers, they, you know, they watch Blue Bloods, they watch Law and Order. They kind of believe their own bullshit. They kind of exist in their own media ecosystem, Newsmax, Fox News things, Tucker Carlson. So they sort of begin to believe their own bullshit, regardless of what the eggheads say. But I want to ask you about the fact that this fentanyl exposure panic can have, and almost certainly has had, lots of deadly consequences, because it removes police officers’ responsibility to help people having an overdose and turns them into the victims while people are either being harmed or dying. So it has actual consequences to how people respond to drug substance abuse emergencies, both police and other medical professionals.
I want to talk about what, because, like you said, there’s a very real, very high-stakes fentanyl crisis in this country, and it seems like the solutions, again, are always this kind of mindless cops and cages, criminalizing immigrants coming over the border. And of course, no dent is made because it’s all just War on Drugs redux, same logic. And this, of course, feeds into that totally irrational, unempirical, unscientific way of approaching substance abuse problems. So let’s go back to the stakes. Say, you know, you spent many months writing this report, collecting all this data, and you put it in a neat package, so people who work with lawmakers, medical, you know, professionals, good-government types can say, Actually, why don’t we pump the brakes here a little bit. What are the stakes here in terms of dealing with the fentanyl crisis, and to what extent can studies like your own and other kind of media toolkits and other efforts to push back on this narrative be useful when it comes to allocating our resources in a rational and humane way?
Zach Siegel: Yeah, I think working with the Center for Just Journalism, who institutionally shepherded this analysis in this report, their goal and their theory is, Let’s take this kind of analysis to the culprits, to the local newsrooms. Let’s try to get them on board. Let’s try to get them to cover this differently. That’s like, one of the direct hopeful outcomes of this is at least getting the information ecosystem on the level, at least have accurate reporting about this.
Adam: Has anyone in the media responded to your report that you know of?
Zach Siegel: Not yet. We’re making inroads. I mean, I do think that there could be some kind of presentations and some useful dialogue to come of this. And part of the reason why I think it’s so difficult, and like you mentioned, that the report, scathing in substance, but the tone, I’m trying to be kind of subtle here. I don’t think it’s like the local news being malicious for causing all this. I think there are no science or health reporters in these newsrooms. The local news industry is consolidated and completely hollowed out and doesn’t have the resources to do real journalism. And I think that’s part of what this is all about, is what we’re seeing is just, what happens when this industry is so structurally broken. The basic tenets of journalism are just completely failing. And call me naive, or a Boy Scout about journalism, but I was taught that you talk to people, they tell you stuff, and you go figure out if it’s true or not, and if it’s true, you write it up and send it out there. The most basic idea of what journalism is, just, isn’t being done,
Nima: Right. Because there’s a press release that the cops send over that just gets basically reprinted.
Zach Siegel: Yeah, or like, body camera footage like that is kind of like the golden nugget for journalists. And oh, the police are just handing over pre-edited, pre-packaged, ready for primetime body cam of very dramatic, sensational footage of their police officer falling to the ground and having a serious reaction. That’s going to run on the news, because the news is basically assigning, or the police are assigning the story, and they run with it. So all of that is very much at the top of my mind for this kind of analysis. And then to your question, Adam, it’s like another big consequence of this kind of distorted reporting is about budget and resource allocation, on a policy level. And this could be a whole other investigation unto itself, but I talked about the hazmat suits and the full-on Breaking Bad gear.
So now, like when police do a drug bust or whatever, and there’s powder on a coffee table, now this scene is like tens of thousands of dollars of additional resources being deployed there, and this is such an incredible waste. This does nothing to prevent more overdoses, or the arrest itself is probably doing next to nothing to prevent addiction and suffering and substance use from happening. And so I just think there is an extreme punitive attitude that keeps rearing its head about this particular problem, there seems to be a window of change that opens up. And, you know, Let’s do public health, let’s get medicine in there. We really went down the wrong road with this Drug War thing. And here we are in 2024 and there’s just ferocious pushback to anything that reeks of radical harm-reduction ideas and anarchy. And look at Portland, and look at Oregon, they decriminalized drugs, and it turned into the apocalypse, like we can’t do that again. So it’s just very troubling that we’re just kind of stuck in this doom loop, frankly, where incarceration rates go way high and extreme and, Oh, we went overboard. We better dial it back and be nice again. And that’s the cycle I feel like we’re totally trapped in.
Nima: Well, I think this report is such a important distillation of kind of this cascade of failures, not only drug policy, but as you’re talking about, public health policy, policing policy, and also the media industry itself, that is incapable of just doing the basic job of being skeptical when it counts and being empathetic when it matters most. And so. just want to thank you so much, Zach, for joining us on the show again and for talking about this really important report again. The report is entitled “Fentanyl Exposure: Myths, Misconceptions, and the Media.” It was put out by the Center for Just Journalism, authored by our guest, Zach Siegel, alongside contributors Laura Bennett, Bella Horton, and Andrew Ian Stolbach. Of course, we have been speaking with friend of the pod, Zach Siegel, journalist, researcher, a writer living in Chicago whose writing on public health, mental health, addiction, drug policy, and criminal justice has been featured in news outlets and magazines all over such as the New York Times, Harpers, the Atlantic, Slate, Wired, The Nation, Scientific American, the New Republic, etc., etc., so many other places.
Zach Siegel: Citations Needed Drug War correspondent.
Nima: [Laughs] Most importantly, Citations Needed Drug War correspondent. He writes a newsletter at ZachSiegel.Substack.com, which you should absolutely subscribe to, and you can follow him on Twitter @ZachWritesStuff. Zach, thank you so much again for joining us again on Citations Needed.
Zach Siegel: This was great. Thanks for having me, guys.
Nima: And that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We will be back very shortly with more full-length episodes of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for that. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, August 7, 2024.
