On December 15, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Designating Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.” The order declares that “Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic. Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose.” If it was not already clear and despite many think pieces and obituaries to it, the US government continues its failed War on Drugs.

This designation of fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction has been nearly a decade in the making across multiple presidential administrations and with bipartisan support and media complicity. The people of the US have been groomed for this moment since 2015. On March 18, 2015, the Obama administration’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a nationwide alert that “fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin and accidental inhalation of airborne powder can also occur.” The DEA doubled down on this threat over a year later, when, on June 10, 2016, they released a roll call video and press release reiterating that “Fentanyl Exposure Kills.” The press release notes that “A very small amount ingested, or absorbed through your skin, can kill you.”

The last statement is only partially true. It is important to understand that, if used without a doctor’s supervision, fentanyl is a dangerous drug that has led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths over the last decade. However, doctors, pharmacologists and their associations, with Dr. Ryan Marino at the forefront, have long noted that fentanyl cannot kill you through passive exposure or absorption through the skin except under rare circumstances. For example, Dr. Marino noted that “you would probably have to be in a wind tunnel with dunes of fentanyl around you” in order to overdose from exposure to fentanyl in the air. Chad Sabora, a harm reduction expert, put fentanyl in his hand to show that skin exposure is not killer. A case study where a researcher spilled a “large dose” of fentanyl “at a site with some skin barrier compromise, a factor that can increase fentanyl absorption,” experienced “no clinical effects of opioid exposure.” There have been zero reported cases of someone touching fentanyl and dying.

Despite the scientific debunkings of police claims that fentanyl exposure kills, as Alec Karakatsanis so aptly shows in his work, the media report what the cops tell them without hesitation and context. Police would send out a press release reporting that one of their officers overdosed from fentanyl exposure and the media shared it unchecked. In 2020, research showed that the fentanyl exposure panic had “appeared in 551 news articles spanning 48 states” and that these reports were shared over 450,000 times on Facebook “potentially reaching nearly 70,000,000 users" from 2015 to 2019.

The most egregious example for this narrative comes from Bloomberg in 2018. The headline reads “This Killer Opioid Could Become a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” accompanied by a picture showing a grim reaper figure spreading powder, implied to be fentanyl, over a large city.

The media and the police had zero excuses here. In 2017, the American College and Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology released a joint statement that said, “the risk of clinically significant exposure to emergency responders is extremely low.” Yet, in tandem, the police and media circulated the false narrative of fentanyl exposure. This continues into the present. In 2022, Zachary Siegel wrote in the New York Times of the continued trend of viral fentanyl exposure police videos. Just this past summer in my home state of South Carolina, the media reported on a sheriff’s deputy who was administered Narcan after collapsing from “

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