photo credit: Noah Abrams/KRCB
The Santa Rosa gas station where a Sonoma County sheriff's deputy allegedly overdosed by touching fentanyl on Oct. 31, 2023.

A month later, details remain vague as the office says the incident is still under investigation.  

As NorCal Public Media and the California Newsroom found, law enforcement agencies have been primed to see fentanyl as an invisible killer, even if their fears aren’t supported by evidence.

Just after three in the morning on October 31, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office responded to the Rotten Robbie gas station on Todd Road in Santa Rosa for a report that someone left behind what appeared to be fentanyl. 

Department spokesperson Rob Dillion said the deputy, whose name has not been released, was wearing gloves when handling the suspected potent painkiller, which was inside a plastic bag. 

“Because it looked close enough to suspected fentanyl that he didn't want to bother with it,” Dillion told KRCB News. “And very shortly started feeling the effects.”

The sheriff’s office said the deputy felt lightheaded, dizzy, and experienced rapid tunnel vision so his partner gave him Narcan, which reverses the opioid’s effects. Soon those symptoms went away. 

“He was checked out by medics on scene,” Dillion said. “He was monitored for the rest of the evening. He said that he had a headache afterwards, but that other than that he was feeling fine.”

The following day the sheriff’s office posted about the incident on Facebook, saying as little as two milligrams of fentanyl can quickly be deadly and "our deputies face challenges and threats that take on different forms daily; some are obvious and easily seen, and others are silent and nearly invisible." 

 Stories like that can quickly spread across social media… as fentanyl remains a major contributor to fatal and nonfatal overdoses in the U.S.

[SD body cam rustling plastic]

 One such event occurred in July 2021 when a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy collapsed after handling some fentanyl. The deputy’s partner, believing he may have been overdosing, administered Narcan into his nostril. 

SD Body Cam: 

[Plastic packaging tearing and radio chatter]

Deputy 1: “Hey, buddy. It’s okay. Breath.”

The San Diego deputy received three doses of Narcan before he started speaking again. 

SD Body Cam:Deputy 1: Do you think it was the dope or do you think you were having heat exhaustion?”

Deputy 2: No, I was good. I just got light-headed. 

[fade under]

The initial clip and subsequent news coverage went viral. 

Fox 11 LA: “Shocking body camera video released tonight by the San Diego Sheriff’s Department. It shows a deputy on the brink of death after being exposed to fentanyl.”

[fade under]

The sheriff’s department used the video for a public service announcement about the dangers of fentanyl. But when unedited body camera footage was released---medical experts said the deputy didn’t appear to be overdosing.

It’s a trend toxicologists, addiction specialists and other experts have been seeing and studying for years. 

Hope Smiley-McDonald is a research sociologist and director of RTI International’s Center for Forensic Science Advancement and Application. In 2021 she and her colleagues published research after interviewing 23 law enforcement leaders and officers from across the United States.

“In the very first interview that we had with an officer, that person shared that a grain of sand could kill you was more profoundly terrifying, then the thought of getting shot or stabbed,” Smiley-McDonald said. “And that just really stuck with us.”

Smiley-McDonald said that in those interviews, law enforcement pointed to a 2016 video from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which issued a grave warning. 

“A very small amount ingested or absorbed through your skin can kill you,” the video said.

“That was an incredible source of information for officers,” Smiley-McDonald said. “So when the DEA says something like that, it really carries a lot of weight with them.”

But experts say warnings like that are without merit. 

To combat the spread of medically inaccurate misinformation, in 2017 the American Colleges of Medical and Clinical Toxicology put out a statement saying “the risk of clinically significant exposure to emergency responders is extremely low.” 

One of the authors of that statement is Dr. Lewis Nelson, chair of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey medical school. He says six years later, it still stands. 

“Unfortunately, it’s really not possible to be passively exposed to fentanyl to a degree at which you would develop clinical symptoms, certainly not overdose,” Nelson told KRCB News.

Nelson said people who experience overdose symptoms, like feelings of sedation and depressed breathing, do so after ingesting fentanyl or other opioids through their veins, noses or mouths.  

He said the symptoms experienced by officers exposed to opioids are different from symptoms of an actual overdose. And they don’t develop “immediately” like Sonoma County and other law enforcement agencies say. 

“It's virtually impossible to imagine a situation where there's enough fentanyl, in the ambient environment in which somebody walks into to develop instant onset of the same degree, if not worse,” Nelson said. “The whole thing from a poisoning perspective just does not hold together.”

Smiley-McDonald said the symptoms officers experience more closely align with an anxiety attack. 

“The heart palpitations, the heavy breathing or the shortness of breath, the sweating,” Smiley-McDonald said. “Those are panic attacks, those are not overdose symptoms.”

So using opioid-reversing drugs like Narcan,  she said “might be a little bit of a placebo effect for them.”

The federal government has since updated its messaging to first responders. Here’s a training video from the National Security Council released in 2018 depicting a police officer encountering powdered fentanyl. 

Officer 1: “What’s going on?”

Officer 2: “I got this on my hands”

Officer 1: “Wash your hands. You’ll be okay.”

Officer 2: “You think?

Smiley-McDonald said the myths around fentanyl still persist in the law enforcement community and that fear poses a potential ripple effect, beyond panic attacks.

“So an officer gets called to an overdose and all of a sudden, they're, they're hesitating to touch someone who might be overdosing, right, and seconds matter,” Smiley-McDonald said.

Experts recommend that first responders who may have been exposed to fentanyl be tested in a timely manner. 

That didn’t happen in the case of the San Diego sheriff’s deputy two years ago. And it’s still unclear if the Sonoma County deputy was tested. 

We requested more information on the incident at the Rotten Robbie, including body camera footage, but the sheriff’s office denied our request, citing an ongoing investigation. 

Dillion said  it’s unclear how the deputy ingested the fentanyl, but maintains that the department’s assessment was correct. 

“It was pretty clearly an exposure to something and as soon as he was administered, Narcan, all of those effects went away,” Dillion said.

Editor's Note: Brian Krans is working with the California Newsroom, a collaboration of California public radio stations, NPR and CalMatters. KRCB News' Greta Mart and Noah Abrams contributed to this report.