‘Not possible.’ Experts question video of California deputy’s ‘overdose’ on fentanyl
A harrowing police video shows Deputy David Faiivae of San Diego collapse to the ground after finding a stash of a white powdery substance identified as fentanyl while searching a vehicle.
“I’m not gonna let you die,” his partner tells Faiivae as he administers Narcan to counteract the suspected drug overdose, McClatchy News reported.
San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore appears at the end of the video, posted to Instagram, to warn viewers that “being exposed to just a few small grains of fentanyl could have deadly consequences.”
But some medical experts say there’s “zero chance” Faiivae overdosed just from touching the drug and say his symptoms in the video aren’t typical signs of an overdose.
“This narrative is impossible,” Dr. Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio told KFMB. “This video is not an overdose. It is not possible to overdose on fentanyl in this way.”
“This doesn’t sound rational and reasonable to me,” Paul Christo, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who studies the opioid crisis, told The Washington Post.
A similar incident involving fentanyl occurred in May in Michigan, McClatchy News reported.
Gore told The San Diego Union-Tribune that he’s “shocked” by the pushback from medical experts. The agency will release the full bodycam video and any toxicology results, he said.
“We were not trying to deceive anybody, trying to hype the issues,” Gore told the publication, noting the agency did not consult any doctors before posting the video.
“I saw the video,” Gore told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “Everybody that saw the video saw him seize up, go down, fall on his head. The drugs tested for fentanyl. It was classic signs of fentanyl overdose — that’s why we called it that.”
But Leo Beletsky, a professor at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, says it’s not possible to overdose so quickly just from touching fentanyl, KGTV reported.
“I would say there’s zero chance that it was caused by fentanyl exposure, in this case,” Beletsky told the station. “You would need to be in a room where lots of powder was constantly in the air for hours in order to start ingesting enough of it to experience these symptoms.”
Fentanyl, a synthetic prescription painkiller, has been blamed for an upsurge of overdose deaths across the United States and can be deadly in small doses when taken.
This story was originally published August 11, 2021 at 11:48 AM with the headline "‘Not possible.’ Experts question video of California deputy’s ‘overdose’ on fentanyl."