Local news outlet WKRN ran a story this week perpetuating a particularly pernicious myth — and the internet has noticed.
On Monday, the ABC affiliate ran a story headlined "‘I thought I was dying’: Woman hospitalized after picking up $1 bill in Nashville.” In the piece — which ran as a segment during the outlet’s 5 p.m. news broadcast — WKRN’s Stephanie Langston reports that a Kentucky couple experienced what they believed to be an accidental overdose of “fentanyl or a similar drug” due to picking up a $1 bill in a Bellevue McDonald’s. From the story:
It was only a matter of minutes after picking up the dollar bill that Renee Parsons felt as though she couldn’t breathe and her body began to feel numb.
“I couldn’t even breathe. It’s almost like a burning sensation, if you will, that starts here at your shoulders, and then it just goes down because it’s almost like it’s numbing your entire body,” Parsons explained.
Justin Parsons said his wife’s speech began to slur before she went unconscious, while he drove to the closest hospital. “I grabbed my husband’s arm with the same hand that I had the money in and said, Justin please help me, it won’t stop it’s getting worse.”
Soon after her husband felt side effects as well. “My lips started going numb and my arm broke out in a rash,” Justin Parsons said.
His symptoms lasted for about an hour while Renee’s lasted for about four before she was released on an accidental overdose.
The family says the toxicology report doesn’t test for synthetic drugs, but they feel confident fentanyl or a similar drug was on the money.
The problem, of course, is that this is impossible. As has been noted many times by many experts, misinformation about the risk of fentanyl overdose due to touching or inhaling the drug is widespread, particularly among law enforcement. And the possibility that a person can touch an item with fentanyl on it, then touch their partner, and their partner also experience symptoms of an overdose — while neither person has experienced any sort of high, mind you? Absurd.
While fentanyl is indeed a deadly synthetic opioid that has claimed many lives across the country and here in Nashville, it is not possible to experience an overdose simply from making skin contact with trace amounts of the substance — on a random piece of currency or elsewhere. In fact, the final three paragraphs of WKRN’s story even make note of this. Reporter Langston spoke with Dr. David Edwards, an anesthesiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who noted that “simply touching a drug will not cause an overdose ... but the risk is still concerning.” (Also of note: Transdermal fentanyl patches do exist and are often prescribed to people experiencing severe pain — but these contain large doses of the drug and are left on the skin for long stretches of time.)
But of course, the damage was already done. Tweets about the story from both WKRN and Langston have been mercilessly roasted by Twitter users far and wide, who have called the article “delusional” and “dumb.” Other local TV outlets including WSMV and NewsChannel 5 picked up the story. To the outlet's credit, NewsChannel 5 takes a more critical approach, even noting that a Metro police officer at St. Thomas “did not believe [Parsons had] been exposed to fentanyl because she did not need Narcan to be resuscitated and preliminary tests at the hospital did not show any drugs in her system.”
So what then, if not an overdose? Experts have suggested that law enforcement officers reporting overdose due to fentanyl exposure are more likely experiencing anxiety or panic attacks. It would appear the anxiety and misinformation are now spreading beyond law enforcement circles — and we have news outlets like WKRN in part to thank for that.
