It's clearly a psychosomatic issue spread by social contagion within LEO circles. Unfortunately, they're the type who are among the least willing to admit that they've been duped. However, the cure is clear; stop the spread of the meme before it infects more LEOs.
That was my take on Havana Syndrome. And it became clear to me after hearing some spook or other talk about how stressful their job was as evidence that there's no way they could be suffering from anxiety; they didn't believe they were susceptible to the stress.
My guess is that Havana Syndrome is a lot like Lyme disease. At first people thought it was just people complaining but then it became supported by science.
Yeah but there’s actually a tick bite involved with Lyme. We know about other tick borne diseases. Its a solid start point for medical research to begin with…
where as with Havana Syndrome we have to speculate about the mechanism of action, and introduction, and basically everything since there was nothing physical to go on beyond the patient’s physical symptoms, we have someone going “agh my brain”, and have to hunt around for answers.
And with this Fentanyl thing we’ve just got people strait up reacting wrong to a substance, full on placebo effect “high from smoking turf grass” type of reactions, except instead of a relatively harmless thing like a weed high we have significantly negative reactions displayed by the Law Enforcement Officers, so I suppose it’s technically the nocebo effect, and given the level of information we have about the substance, and the statistical sample of LEO that are presenting with the reactions, either becoming a cop somehow makes you allergic to fentanyl, or it’s in their damn heads …
and the problem is how to A: get this through to them, and B: prevent them using their social influence to spread this psychosomatic to the wider community. There’s a lot of evidence for how modern society has made us more vulnerable to social contagion like this, we’ve got media exposure priming us with the truth of how bad the world can be and how little we understand of some of it, we have social media spreading things based on engagement metrics that strongly correlate with our base instincts like fear of threats (real or perceived), and police have a significant influence in society due to their implicit position of trust with many governments deferring to police force’s advice on matters of crime and social issues (the appropriateness of this approach is extremely variable so this isn’t the place to discuss it at length, sometimes it’s good, sometimes the cops strait up abuse/manipulate this and politicians won’t fight it due to the pressure to avoid things like being labeled weak on crime)
So yeah maybe we get some funding and do some double blind trials recorded fully on video and show it to the cops as part of training. “You see this chalk powder, we’ve replaced it with fentanyl, let’s see if the cop can tell” … and then we show the counter example “we replaced this fentanyl with chalk powder, let’s see if the cop can tell”… I don’t think it will take long for them to stop wanting to look stupid.
It’s easy enough to explain away behaviour of officers in the field with things like “you can never know and have to treat everything as a real threat” and “we can’t show you all the other incidents where it really happened because that’s evidence part of an ongoing investigation that would be compromised by showing you it”. But I’m not sure how long this would hold up if you’re in a climate controlled lab where we can reassure them we’re doing this for science and to better protect them from the dangers of fentanyl. It’s important to not lie about the motivations but clever wording like this is pretty standard for this kind of experiment when it’s done, lying to the participants undermines your moral high ground when sharing the results with the community the participants are from (in this case LEOs)
Title is actually "Cops say they're being poisoned by fentanyl. Experts say the risk is 'extremely low'" but I could not fit it in without making it weird or breaking grammar.
I think the origin of what's now being blamed on "fentanyl" is the real risk that even the smallest inhalation of improperly stored synthetic opioids (things that are 100x+ strong than fentanyl) could cause injury or death.
Because these synthetics were legal (?) to import for a long time, field agents probably do have a real risk of encountering them stored improperly, even if NPR couldn't find a case about it. Probably it wouldn't have shown up under "fentanyl" if that's all they searched, but it's the same crisis.
I even recall one HN poster telling their story about designing a synthetic opioid and paying a lab overseas to make it.
Obviously cops doing bad things important to report on, but it's a shame NPR doesn't give the context about the chemicals, since the chemicals are the cause of the crisis.
The difference here is Russia deliberately converted it into a aerosol form that can be absorbed by the lungs. It’s not the same as carfentanil dust (or vapor) as a result of bad storage.
I happen to know with several people that work in an inner-city ER, and they see a dozen or so fentanyl overdoses a day.
What is called "fentanyl" on the streets is not the same thing as the prescription drug fentanyl used in the ER. The ER Doctors are well aware of this and their protocols reflect this too. Beside a different composition of fentanyl itself, nearly everything that comes back in toxicology reports indicates it's nearly always laced with a lot of other things.
It's overly simplistic to treat the unreliability of witnesses as if it can only happen at one level of cognition, as implied by "psychosomatic".
What people perceive and think when they are being lied to is both complex and fundamental to a lot of experiments.
If someone reports their feelings, maybe they are interpreting what they do feel based on the false information they are given.
It doesn't necessarily mean they do feel the same as if the actual phenomenon occurred.
Suppose I was in an experiment testing acupuncture. And I am told that it should not hurt. And yet, it does hurt. That doesn't mean I necessarily report it as such. I might rationalize, not having experience with being stuck with a needle, that this is not painful - it's unpleasant, but it's something different. So I say "no, it doesn't hurt". But then, a month later, I experience a similar pain in a different context, and I say to myself "aha, this hurts the same way, and therefore that previous experience hurt".
Importantly, in this scenario, I am correctly perceiving reality at all times even though I am an unreliable reporter. The pain didn't change. I just got confused about whether it was "named" pain and whether it was "socially" pain, and whether it fit into a standard "taxonomy" of pain.
A thing that's been on HN a few times, Richard Feynman's comments on understanding rats used in experiments, comes to my mind and makes me think that scientifically minded people should respect humans for being at least as complex as lab rats.
One doesn't have to be a scientist to be self-aware as a human being.
> There's no evidence of a dose/effect at this type of interaction.
That's pretty self-evidently false, isn't it? I don't see how you could possibly say that, given the OP article.
There's a pretty awful trend among certain people to claim that there is "no evidence" of something, when what they mean is that the evidence isn't strong enough to be convincing, or hasn't been corroborated by a peer-reviewed, double-blind, reproducible study.
But saying that direct statements reflecting the observations of people experiencing the phenomenon are "no[t] evidence" is both intellectually dishonest and an awful waste of credibility.
Carfentanil, not to be confused with fentanyl, is a an opiod used by vets to bring down elephants and rhinoceroses. It's approximately 100 times more potent than fentanyl.
Correct, and something like a pinhead is enough to kill a human. I don't know if it can be rapidly uptaken through skin though in any of the street forms.
> Carfentanil is one of the most potent opioids known. In rats and mice, the LD 50 of carfentanil is 3.39 and 18.75 mg/kg, respectively, after intravenous (IV) administration [1,2]. After intraperitoneal injection, lethality is observed at 326.4 μg/kg in rats and 83.1 μg/kg in ferrets [3, 4]. Signs of carfentanil intoxication including catalepsy, loss of righting reflex, and apnea/respiratory depression are observed at 18.2 and 8.92 μg/kg in rats and ferrets, respectively [3, 4]. The lowest reported lethal inhalation concentration in rats is 300 mg/m 3 [5], while exposure to concentrations as low as 0.4 mg/m 3 for 1 minute induces loss of consciousness in mice [6]. Because carfentanil has no approved human uses, the potency in humans has not been determined. It is estimate to be 100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 times more potent than morphine, with an estimated lethal dose in humans of 20 μg (0.286 μg/kg) [7]. Data are available from one study in which healthy, non-drug using volunteers were given an IV bolus of 0.019 μg/kg carfentanil; dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and itching were observed [8]
While it may be true that the powder-form isn't able to natively pass through the skin, one of the oldest delivery mechanisms for medical applications is via transdermal patch.
You might think that, but they're really not. How could they be, when candidates with too much intelligence are rejected from the job for being "overqualified"?
I'm not one to trust police, however I recognize that police work is stressful and scary at times so it is more plausible to me that police are having panic attacks, maybe a form of mass hysteria about fentanyl rather than tons of them lying about it. I do not disagree that police have a serious honesty and accountability problem though so i'm sure there have been cases where it was lying about the fentanyl.
1. be overly vigilant to a real or percieved threat for an extended period of time
2. "threat-finding" starts leaking into regular life
3. freak out about a normal situation falsely identified as a threat
The 3rd step resolves the whole thing, and is actually good (if nobody gets hurt!). That's a chance to take a breather and shine some light on the situation, or start the whole thing over again.
