The Link Between Fentanyl and Havana Syndrome Is. PANIC!

*GunnerQ scans the daily crime headlines*

Police officer overdoses on fentanyl during vehicle search, saved by Narcan

It happens, man. Gotta wear gloves these days.

Doctors claim it was just a panic attack because fentanyl can’t do that.

Eh? Cop was male… male cops don’t have panic attacks.

Don’t believe the DEA and CDC. The cop had a panic attack. Nothing to see here except a pattern emerging across North America which means nothing at all.

We got a live one! *GunnerQ snaps gloves on*

Police officers are collapsing after touching fentanyl, but experts say you can’t overdose from skin contact. The likelier story? Panic attacks.

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/cops-collapsing-touching-fentanyl-cant-140100227.html

By Erin Schumaker, 27 October 2021

Occam’s Razor… FAILED!!!

The video is harrowing: It shows a San Diego deputy crumpling to the ground in a parking lot after accidentally touching white powder during an arrest.

“I got you, OK? I’m not going to let you die,” someone said in a voice-over. Then someone yelled, “I need Narcan!”

In the video, Deputy David Faiivae, the officer in training who collapsed, wiped away a tear after describing how his lungs locked up that day in July.

“I almost died of a fentanyl overdose,” Faiivae, 32, said. Then Bill Gore, the sheriff of San Diego County, appeared on-screen with a public-service message.

“Being exposed to just a few small grains of fentanyl could have deadly consequences,” Gore said. He added, “Please take the time to share this video.”

But experts say you can’t overdose from touching fentanyl. So why did the San Diego police officer collapse?

Segue to video

h ttps://www.instagram.com/tv/CSNPBxdDZao/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=31cc64c4-8d37-4664-b4b7-22d1f051873a873a

It’s bodycam footage but presented in the format of a warning video to law enforcement. Because I can’t archive it, here’s the TL;DR. A San Diego sergeant and trainee were searching a vehicle after an arrest (suspect not present, presumably locked in a patrol car). Upon opening the vehicle, bags leaking a white power resembling fentanyl were located in plain sight. The trainee was not shown even touching the substance but while standing next to the vehicle, he suddenly lost balance, collapsed and went into respiratory arrest.

Per the interviewed training sergeant, symptoms included the trainee’s eyes rolling back into his head. Narcan, an emergency treatment for opioid overdose, was credited by the Sherriff for saving the trainee’s life.

That’s not a panic attack. There wasn’t even an environmental stressor… no screaming people, brightly lit day etc. It really sounds like a drug overdose.

End segue

It’s not that fentanyl isn’t dangerous. A record 93,000 drug-overdose deaths were reported last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, and potent synthetic opioids such as fentanyl are the most common drugs involved in those deaths.

But skin contact with fentanyl is different, experts say.

“The only way to overdose is from injecting, snorting, or some other way of ingesting it,” Dr. Ryan Marino, the medical director of toxicology at University Hospitals in Cleveland, told The New York Times. “You cannot overdose from secondhand contact.”

Snorting? As in, inhaling? That would be a very nasty drug, if you can OD as quickly as you smell it.

Marino is such a Social Justice Warrior of an ER doc, I’ll have a postscript at the end to dishonor him.

Moreover, the symptoms people describe after touching fentanyl vary widely, from dizziness to blurry vision to heart palpitations.

No. Drugs do NOT vary widely in their symptoms, excepting allergic reactions which don’t apply here. I find it very hard to believe that you can get dosed on fentanyl by casual exposure but never overdosed. The only difference is *ahem* dosage.

“Passive exposure to fentanyl does not result in clinical toxicity,” Dr. Lewis Nelson, the director of the medical toxicology division at Rutgers Medical School, wrote in a STAT News op-ed in 2018. He added that the reactions usually resolve on their own, and faster than the drug’s effects should last.

“They aren’t consistent with the signs and symptoms of opioid poisoning – the triad of slowed breathing, decreased consciousness, and pinpoint pupils,” Nelson wrote.

Segue to that 2018 op-ed:

.Passive. fentanyl exposure: more myth than reality

h ttps://www.statnews.com/2018/12/21/passive-fentanyl-exposure-myth-reality/

By Lewis S. Nelson and Jeanmarie Perrone, 21 December 2018

The news reports are alarming: Merely being in a room or in close contact with fentanyl, an increasingly popular opioid narcotic, can poison you, they say.

Perhaps the best known report of passive casualties from fentanyl is a 2017 news account that went viral. In it, an East Liverpool, Ohio, police officer brushed a white powder off his uniform, lost consciousness within an hour, and awakened after being given a dose of naloxone, a drug that quickly reverses the effects of opioids.

Was that a panic attack?

Reports of fentanyl-related passive toxicity has led to the release of hyperbolic warnings and burdensome recommendations by Drug Enforcement Administration, including the use of extensive personal protective equipment, such as gloves, paper coveralls, eye protection, and even particulate respirators. We believe that such responses to passive casualties from fentanyl are excessive and may actually interfere with the ability of first responders and others to do their jobs.

That didn’t age well. The Plandemic says hello!

All of these moves appear driven by concerns about the perceived risk of passive exposure to synthetic drugs, especially fentanyl and its analogs, by law enforcement personnel and first responders. Although mitigating risk is laudable, the risks of transient exposure have been blown out of proportion by media coverage.

One of the issues with this dramatization of fentanyl toxicity is that it further stigmatizes substance users as contagious and dangerous. That can potentially delay care to those who need prompt rescue and treatment. This trepidation is reminiscent of the fear of caring for people with HIV in the 1980s.

His motivation for countering alarmism is to protect the reputations of drug addicts? “If you wear all that safety gear then people will be scared to be around junkies shooting up!” That has nothing to do with the question of PPE for fentanyl.

There is clear evidence that passive exposure to fentanyl does not result in clinical toxicity. Descriptions of the signs and symptoms of those who have supposedly experienced passive toxicity vary widely. They include dizziness, blurry vision, pallor, weakness, sweatiness, high blood pressure, chest pain, heart palpitations, anxiety, and occasionally seizure-like activity. These findings are usually transient and resolve on their own, often far faster than would be expected, and are incompatible with the known duration of the drug’s effect. What’s more, they aren’t consistent with the signs and symptoms of opioid poisoning . the triad of slowed breathing, decreased consciousness, and pinpoint pupils.

That training video had slowed breathing, loss of consciousness, rolled-back eyes… and to be fair, possible dizziness. Which of these sets of symptoms is the correct one for opioids?

It.s also important to put into context the practical risk of exposure to fentanyl. Pharmacists have been working with fentanyl for years, without reports of passive exposure. The same holds for surgeons, anesthesiologists, emergency physicians, and others working in operating rooms and emergency departments, where fentanyl is routinely administered as a pain reliever.

A little amateur research indicates that medicinal fentanyl is provided in forms that preclude accidental exposure, from liquids to patches to lollipops. It seems that these medical personnel don’t work with street versions of the drug… and I notice that chemical forms of fentanyl also vary.

I searched for specific examples and found this interesting story.

A Guide to Fentanyl Touch Overdoses, Which Do Not Exist

h ttps://filtermag.org/fentanyl-touch-inhalation-overdose-police-san-diego/

By Claire Zagorski, 11 August 2021

Once as a paramedic student, I accidentally sprayed fentanyl in my face. It was my first time administering the medication, and a patient with a broken ankle was lying on the gurney in front of me, tensed uncomfortably, when the ambulance hit a curb. My thumb was hovering over the syringe’s plunger. I stumbled. The fentanyl squirted out, streamed through the air and splattered onto my cheek.

The patient got a laugh out of this, as did my trainers. This wasn’t cruel of them; I was fine. I didn’t feel any effects at all.

This makes sense, because fentanyl can’t absorb through the skin very well. (There are fentanyl skin patches prescribed for pain, especially among cancer patients, which work very slowly and use additives to help the fentanyl absorb, but they’re in no way analogous to either liquid injectable fentanyl or powdered illicit fentanyl.) But month after month, we see headlines recounting police encounters with fentanyl that lead to.as the police tell it.sudden, dramatic, near-fatal overdose, often requiring multiple doses of naloxone.

A plausible account, since it doesn’t make Claire look good. But the police aren’t faking it… not when it’s an international pattern… and I’m detecting a lot of deception along the lines of “street fentanyl is safe to touch because liquid fentanyl doesn’t absorb through the skin.”

Deputy David Faiivae of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department recently had one such experience, according to a widely circulated video put out by the department. [GQ: linked above] Faiivae had no direct contact with the powder; he was simply standing in its vicinity. Shortly after being warned by his field training officer to stay back from the suspected fentanyl..Hey dude, too close. You can’t get too close to it..Faiivae fell to the ground. He was given four doses of naloxone, after which he returned to his normal self.

What a coincidence, that he had a panic attack that looked like an opioid OD at the exact moment his training officer was warning him to step away from the opioid.

Perhaps unlike Bill Clinton, the trainee DID inhale?

End segue

But the police officer in San Diego wasn’t the only one to collapse. Officers in Ohio, Arkansas, Massachusetts, California, and North Carolina have also struggled to breathe or fainted after touching fentanyl. Faiivae declined to comment on the incident. The New Republic’s “The Politics of Everything” podcast set out to solve this mystery last month, and it concluded that officers were having panic attacks, fueled by misinformation.

“People are probably familiar with what in the 19th century or early 20th century was called hysteria,” Patrick Blanchfield, an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research who specializes in psychoanalytic theory, told “The Politics of Everything.”

In classic hysteria cases, symptoms present as temporary paralysis, Blanchfield added: “People’s limbs would lock up. They would start screaming, wailing – no apparent reason.”

In modern-day terms, police officers may be experiencing a conversion disorder – when intense stress is converted into physical symptoms, Blanchfield explained. It’s similar to a panic attack.

Blanchfield didn’t think the officers were exaggerating or collapsing on purpose. He believed they were truly scared.

Scared of what? The trainee didn’t have years of pent-up PTSD. There was no indication that the arrest had been violent. And as anybody who’s had to learn a hard field job knows, the presence of a training officer is more of a relief than a stress.

“That suffering is real,” he said.

Your excuse is not, Pat. You could have said “I don’t know.” You could have, being a minor celebrity, probably palmed and sniffed some powdered fentanyl to prove your claims of harmlessness. No doubt a few cops would love to watch the result.

But instead, you actively claimed “panic attacks”. That many police officers, across many jurisdictions and cultures, are having freak panic attacks that respond to Narcan. That don’t resemble the panic attacks caused by poor mental health. Men who trade punches with the insane and clear houses in the dark where bad guys hide with unknown weapons, are traumatized instead by a white powder that you “experts” claim is safe.

You “experts” are lying. I don’t know the cause either… see, it doesn’t hurt to admit ignorance… but I’m not trying to handwave it away, either. Why do you want this topic to go away? so badly that you’ll make obvious lies about it?

Because fentanyl is being used as a population-control method, and the faster it kills, the fewer humans pollute the planet with their existence? I really hope not. But first you globalists said you wanted Earth’s population decimated and now you run the world, so yes, I think you would cull us with deadly-toxic drugs. And then lie about it when police accidentally stand downwind.

Policing is a stressful and dangerous job, so news stories and police reports about officers who are said to have overdosed during drug busts might have led to a contagion effect, in which certain behaviors or actions spread through a group.

“When your whole job is maintaining boundaries, but also those boundaries are unstable and full of contradictions, it’s probably not surprising that people develop conversion disorders and contagion fears specifically, that they seize up or act out,” Blanchfield said.

You know what else people are having panic attacks about these days? Hearing crickets in American embassies.

Havana syndrome: US experts pinpoint origin of mysterious illness in new report

h ttps://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1499775/havana-syndrome-usa-origin-mystery-illness-report-crickets-russia-microwave-weapons

By Sebastian Kettley, 1 October 2021

Testimony from “US experts” is why I don’t stream Netflix for my entertainment needs.

The mystery illness, which was first reported in Cuba in 2016, has followed US embassy staff and military personnel around the globe. Cases of Havana syndrome have been reported in the US, China, UK, Poland, Russia, among others, and most recently in Serbia. Symptoms include pain, dizziness and reports of a high-pitched metallic sound, which has led some to speculate these were targetted attacks by America’s adversaries.

Okay. Plausible.

Russia has frequently come under fire for its alleged involvement in the “attacks” although no one has ever proven any involvement from foreign powers.

Less plausible. Russia Russia Russia! Gotta push the Narrative!

Earlier this month, Iain Boyd, a Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, claimed weapons harnessing the power of electromagnetic waves could be responsible.

He said: “If Havana syndrome turns out to be caused by weapons that shoot energy beams, they won’t be the first such weapons.

“As an aerospace engineer and former Vice Chair of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, I’ve researched directed energy.

“I can also personally attest to the effectiveness of directed energy weapons.”

VERY plausible! “Hello, I’m an engineer who has built one of them and tried it on myself. So yeah, they exist.”

You can also buy one. Segue to the Soundlazer website!

h ttps://www.soundlazer.com/non-lethal-acoustic-weapons/

A non-lethal acoustic weapon is a tool or a device that uses sound to immobilize, deafen, threaten, discourage a target or to disperse crowds of people such as rioters. In some cases, they are handy for addressing crowds and for public safety and for transmitting sound over long distances. In many cases, these devices use technologies like ultrasound and infrasound, where the frequencies emitted by devices are higher or lower than what a normal human being can hear. Some of these weapons also use technologies like the directional sound waves, which makes the sound audible only to those that find themselves in that beam.

Cue the mysterious attack on the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, where an attacker used an unknown sound weapon on the employees within the embassy. The attack was inaudible to the people inside the embassy, but the noise caused a lot of damage. Non-lethal acoustic weapons can be a powerful way to control rioters and generally disturb the receiving party.

Out of stock at the moment, alas. Stupid port bottlenecks delaying shipments of ultrasonic weapons so cutting-edge high tech, they’re still California-legal!

End segue.

So, yeah. It’s an open secret that Havana Syndrome is sonic weapons.

No?

In 2020, a study by the US National Academies of Sciences (NAS), Engineering and Medicine concluded more than 130 victims of Havana syndrome have experienced real symptoms.

But with no tangible culprit in sight, the report only served to deepen the mystery.

The mystery illness was explored by authors Robert Baloh and Robert Bartholomew in their March 2020 book, Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.

According to the book’s description, Havana syndrome “is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science”.

The authors concluded at the time Havana syndrome was not an effort to target US diplomats, but rather a psychogenic illness linked to the mating calls of insects.

Y’know, man… I want them to stop lying… but a part of me would miss the freak show.

And according to a declassified report by the US State Department, their conclusion was right on the money.

The document was obtained by BuzzFeed News and was penned by the JASON advisory group – an independent group of specialists who advise the US government on sensitive matters of science and technology.

The report confirms that “many of the affected individuals describe hearing unusual sounds, and that there are a number of recordings of these sounds”. However, an analysis of these sounds concluded these were most likely mechanical or biological in origin and not electronic. The most likely culprit? The Indies short-tailed cricket (Anurogryllis celerinictus).

The report reads: “The call of this animal matches, in nuanced detail, the spectral properties of the recordings from Cuba once room echoes are taken into account.

“Other hypotheses are also plausible, such as generation by mechanical devices (e.g., a worn pump motor), or structure-borne vibration.”

The report also stated with “high confidence” the reported sounds were “not produced by the nonlinear detection of high power radiofrequency or ultrasound pulses”.

However, the report’s findings seem to contradict the NAS’s 2020 report, which concluded microwaves were the “most plausible” culprit.

The NAS told BuzzFeed: “We are grateful to the JASON Group for their insight, which while coming to no firm conclusions, has assisted us in our ongoing investigation of these incidents.”

Damning with faint praise. “I’m so glad the government spent money on you private contractors in order to make us redundant!” So, they still don’t know what actually caused the sickness but they did hear some Cuban crickets and are certain, CERTAIN that it was NOT a sonic attack.

Which is the best proof you can get, short of being next.

But what’s this psychogenic illness that book talked about? Like you can’t guess by now…

THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE HAVANA EMBASSY MYSTERY

h ttps://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/the-real-story-behind-the-havana-embassy-mystery

By Jack Hitt, 6 January 2019

Unfortunate name, that.

An American working at the U.S. Embassy in Havana.some call him Patient Zero.complained that he had heard strange noises outside his home. .It was annoying to the point where you had to go in the house and close all the windows and doors and turn up the TV,. the diplomat told ProPublica. Zero discussed the sound with his next-door neighbor, who also worked at the embassy. The neighbor said, yeah, he too had heard noises, which he described as .mechanical-sounding..…

The outbreak at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba wasn’t the only mysterious illness to pop up in the headlines. Around the same time that embassy officials were preparing to fly home, more than 20 students at an Oklahoma high school suddenly came down with baffling symptoms.uncontrollable muscle spasms, even paralysis. A few years before, a similar incident at a school in upstate New York had caught the attention of the local Fox News affiliate, which sent parents into a panic over the possibility that their children had been stricken by an unidentified immune disorder. But the Cuban mystery, the Trump administration insisted, was different. It was not some environmental mishap, but something far more diabolical.

RUSSIA!

Encouraged by U.S. officials, the media quickly unfurled a story that the mysterious sound was an .attack..an act of war. Some kind of “acoustic weapon” had been secretly aimed at the diplomats, in an effort to reduce them to brain-damaged zombies.

[insert crack about State Department zombies]

The story got told with a side helping of Cold War envy. Private contractors and the Pentagon’s own hip military lab, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, had long been working to develop an arsenal of sound weapons. There had been some limited success with cumbersome devices like MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) and LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), designed to cause excruciating ear pain to disperse mobs on the ground and pirates at sea. The dream, of course, was to get past such giant blunderbusses to something more portable and powerful, like a Flash Gordon ray gun. But the air force, after some experiments, concluded that any such effort using sound waves would be “unlikely” to succeed due to “basic physical principles.. If someone had developed a portable acoustic weapon, they had leapfrogged well beyond the skill set of a Raytheon or Navistar and into the arsenal of Q Branch from the Bond movies.

Behold the Soundlazer!

By January 2018, some of the government’s own experts had ruled out a sonic attack. In an interim report, the F.B.I. revealed that it had investigated sound waves below the range of human hearing (infrasound), those we can hear (acoustic), and those above our hearing range (ultrasound). The conclusion: there was no sonic cause to the physical symptoms experienced by the diplomats.

The FBI is, of course, renowned for their expertise in theoretical infrasonic weapon development. Pay no attention to that aerospace engineer from flyover country. He doesn’t even have a name.

.Most patients had conventional imaging findings, which were within normal limits,. the medical team reported, noting that the few scattered anomalies could “be attributed to other pre-existing disease processes or risk factors.” The scientists wrapped up their report with a sentence that expressed their bafflement: .These individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma.” According to one author, the team enjoyed referring to this contradiction as the “immaculate concussion..

With the medical doctors left scratching their heads, and a sonic weapon ruled out by the F.B.I., enterprising scientists continued their search for a sonic explanation…

If you view what happened to the diplomats in Havana as an .attack,. you must look for something capable of producing such an assault. It would have to emit a sound that varied widely from listener to listener. It would have to strike only people who worked at the embassy. It would have to assail them wherever they happened to be, whether in their homes or staying at a hotel. It would have to produce a wide range of symptoms that seemed to bear no relation to one another. And it would have to start off small, with one or two victims, before spreading rapidly to everyone in the group.

As it happens, there is and always has been one mechanism that produces precisely this effect in humans. Today it’s referred to in the medical literature as conversion disorder.that is, the conversion of stress and fear into actual physical illness. But most people know it by an older, creakier term: mass hysteria. Among scientists, it’s not a popular term these days, probably because “mass hysteria” summons the image of a huge mob, panicked into a stampede (with a whiff of misogyny thrown in). But properly understood, the official definition, when applied to the events in Havana, sounds eerily familiar. Conversion disorder, according to the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, is the “rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms among members of a cohesive social group, for which there is no corresponding organic origin..

.Think of mass psychogenic illness as the placebo effect in reverse,. says Robert Bartholomew, a professor of medical sociology and one of the leading experts on conversion disorder.

And writer of the abovenamed book.

.You can often make yourself feel better by taking a sugar pill. You can also make yourself feel sick if you think you are becoming sick. Mass psychogenic illness involves the nervous system, and can mimic a variety of illnesses..

So, there we have it. State department personnel with inexplicable concussions and overdosed police officers responding to Narcan are both faking it. In one-off situations across the planet.

How did this linked lie happen?

The Bidenreich accepted Bartholomew’s Narrative of Havana Syndrome being psychosomatic just a few weeks ago. When journalists were looking for a way to explain away police suffering (apparently) exposure to extra-toxic levels of fentanyl, they decided to use the same Narrative because it had just been officially approved. It was not a good fit, yet better than “all those police departments are lying”… and most importantly, they couldn’t commit a Narrative Violation if they used fresh copy.

Why are police having panic attacks over exposure to fentanyl? Because journalists are so afraid to be original with their lies that given the chance, they’ll use whatever Potato Joe Stalin just greenlighted.

Postscript

One cannot talk about fentanyl in Current Year without paying homage to Saint Floyd of the Choke. Remember Dr. Marino from above? Watch him discredit himself as an ER doctor:

Dr. Ryan Marino Chauvin trial defense rests . after smearing George Floyd with false overdose theory

h ttps://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/chauvin-trial-defense-rests-after-smearing-george-floyd-false-overdose-ncna1264238

By Dr. Ryan Marino, emergency physician and medical toxicologist, 16 April 2021

.I can’t breathe.” Those were the last words . called out repeatedly . by George Floyd, whose death in the custody of police officers last spring was captured on video and witnessed by millions. Derek Chauvin, an officer in that video, can clearly be seen kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. His murder trial this month has reopened never-quite-healed wounds; it has also recycled old and misleading stereotypes about drug abuse and addiction.

Right off the bat, Marino warn us that this is as much about Narrative control as it is medicine.

The defense, which rested its case Thursday, has spent a considerable amount of time discussing Floyd’s drug use. Defense attorney Eric Nelson has repeatedly mentioned drugs, going so far as to suggest Floyd’s death may have been due to an overdose. This scenario has been disputed by Dr. Andrew Baker, the medical examiner who examined Floyd’s body.

“The only reason you keep mentioning drug use is because my client happened to be on drugs at the time!”

As an emergency physician and medical toxicologist (a specialist in how drugs, medications and overdoses affect the human body) who has further specialized in the treatment of addiction and drug use, I spend a significant amount of my time studying, witnessing and treating drug use in humans. I have unfortunately seen many more overdoses . from fentanyl in particular . than I could possibly count. However, I also frequently see misinformation about drugs and drug use, particularly fentanyl, and the people who use them.

Misinformation about drugs… like police suffering accidental ODs that experts are certain cannot happen? Misinformation about… the people who use drugs? “Check your privilege, law-abiding citizen, that there is a junkie!”

There remain competing theories . posited by a veritable parade of medical experts . about what exactly caused Floyd’s death. But what’s very clear to me is that George Floyd did not die from an overdose.

First, while both fentanyl and methamphetamine were detected on autopsy, the levels detected were not high enough to suggest a fatal overdose. Additionally, postmortem drug levels are notoriously inaccurate…

Which is it? Do we know how much dope was in Floyd or do we not?

…and do not reliably reflect pre-death levels, making their interpretation highly subjective. Postmortem fentanyl levels in particular can be extremely inaccurate and falsely elevated.

Oh, I see. The error can occur in only one direction, the one favorable to your argument.

It’s a sign of the times, that I’m comfortable lecturing at an ER doc about his own medical specialization.

Second, we know . we can see . that Floyd was awake, talking and desperately trying to breathe right up until he died. Fentanyl, and other opioids, cause the exact opposite effect. Opioids act on the brainstem, the part of the brain that controls breathing, to suppress breathing. Not only do opioids suppress breathing, opioids also suppress respiratory drive; they take away even the desire to breathe. We commonly prescribe opioids to help people who are dying or suffering from serious respiratory problems to stop them from feeling “air hunger.” In other words, opioids like fentanyl actually prevent people from knowing they can’t breathe and from feeling like they can’t breathe.

Marino is dishonestly considering the effects of fentanyl and methamphetamine individually, when he knows that Floyd had taken both of them together. It’s anybody’s guess which will dominate which organ, when you take uppers and downers at the same time.

Another assertion the defense has made was that drugs like fentanyl gave Floyd superhuman strength. This theory is supposed to justify extreme physical response from police, even though video shows us that Floyd was already handcuffed, in a prone position (which, when forcefully restrained, is also known to impair breathing)…

No. Chauvin’s hold was known to NOT impair breathing. That’s why it was department policy. See how Marino dances between theory and the incident in question?

…and in the custody of four adult male police officers.

Only one of whom was sitting on him. Chauvin was not a big man, either.

What the science tells us, and what health care workers see every day, is exactly the opposite. Opioids are so well known for their calming and relieving effects that the word “morphine” comes from the Greek god of sleep, Morpheus. Fentanyl is one of the most commonly used sedating agents in both surgical anesthesia and for patients on ventilators in emergency departments and intensive care units. Many of these myths about drugs have racist roots, and the defense about “superhuman” strength rhetoric in particular has a long history of racism.

A high-ranking medical doctor just claimed that some of a drug’s known effects on the human body are racist social constructs.

Methamphetamine, too, is a well-studied drug that is also used medically.

It can treat weight loss. Seriously, that’s what Merck said. Given the weight-loss alternatives available, however, it would be medical malpractice to prescribe something so dangerously addictive to somebody with a demonstrated inability to control his appetites. It can also treat ADHD. Again, malpractice given the safer alternatives.

The video and bystander statements are not consistent with a person who had overdosed on methamphetamine, and the autopsy report does not suggest findings of end-organ damage (like a stroke) that typically cause death from methamphetamine overdose. The argument that methamphetamine or other drugs could have worsened an underlying heart condition has also been debunked.

They ARE consistent. That was a flat-out lie. Although Floyd’s labored breathing would be better attributed to the fentanyl. “Floyd didn’t die of an overdose because he didn’t have a stroke or organ failure”, come on, man. You didn’t get through med school by being this stupid.

The objective information that has been made available, coupled with facts depicted on video, clearly refute overdose as the cause of Floyd’s death. This is also what the medical examiner . the expert pathologist tasked with determining cause of death . has stated. We should not let breathless myths about drugs distract from actual facts. And we cannot allow the narrative that Floyd’s death was somehow deserved because he, like about half of all Americans, used recreational substances.

Fentanyl mixed with methamphetamine is not comparable to beer & coffee. We see here in the boldfaced, that Marino cares as much about the possible consequences of the debate, as the merits of the debate.

George Floyd told us he couldn’t breathe; we would do well to remember his words.

Let’s remember Dr. Marino’s words instead: it’s racist to believe that Floyd’s death was an OD.