KCTV5, after receiving responses questioning its reporting, appended an editors note that did not mention the medical consensus on this question, noting instead that medical records showed the officer was treated for fentanyl exposure and that the D.E.A. had affirmed that its agents potential exposure to fentanyl puts their safety and health on the line.

Three or four decades ago, the American media found itself producing plenty of readily identifiable villains in the nations war on drugs. The Miami of the 1980s, for instance, became a high-intensity zone of armed conflict between cocaine traffickers and the government, an era that inspired countless stylized Hollywood action flicks about cops, drugs and cartel enemies. By the 1990s, local news increasingly entrenched in the business of covering crime sustained a national obsession with urban gangs, which were depicted as so well armed and lawless that a bipartisan consensus formed around cutting the police blank checks to combat them; departments across the country received billions of dollars worth of military-grade equipment, from flash-bang grenades and night-vision goggles to armored trucks, for use in executing even low-level drug warrants. Nightly news broadcasts portrayed both drug users and dealers as dangerous elements concentrated in poverty-blighted inner cities, yet always at risk of creeping into the middle-class viewers suburb.

Police officers on the front lines of todays drug war confront a very different landscape. The human misery of todays overdose crisis is largely hidden from view, and it is certainly not centered on the police; it is squarely borne by drug users and their loved ones. Every single hour of every single day, 12 Americans die from a fatal overdose, according to preliminary C.D.C. data a slow-motion disaster quietly playing out in banal locales like residential neighborhoods, gas-station bathrooms and strip-mall parking lots, in the smallest towns and the largest cities, across social and economic classes. Fatal overdoses occur largely among those who are using substances alone, with no one there to revive them with Narcan. Unlike the police officers, they dont hyperventilate and gasp for air. Instead, they slowly drift off, gradually stop breathing and never wake up again.

Todays astonishing overdose death toll comes not from gang violence or turf wars but from a ubiquitous market of cheap and potent synthetic drugs. And so it is in the drugs themselves that police officers now see grave danger, including to themselves. Last year, the San Diego County Sheriffs Department produced and released its own public-safety video featuring what Sheriff Bill Gore described as traumatic body-worn camera footage of an officers life-threatening fentanyl exposure footage that circulated through various media outlets despite the skepticism of health professionals. Its as though each of these videos seeks to identify the new villain, the shocking peril, in an era whose drug-war battlefields are too diffuse and mundane to capture the public imagination. Images of cinematic urban war zones and Uzi-toting gangsters have been replaced by the knowledge that drug use quietly pervades communities of all sorts. So fear attaches to something equally slippery: fentanyl particles lurking in the air, or even just a few specks on a police uniform, blamed for one officers overdose in Ohio. (According to local reporting, the officer was eventually terminated from the force for, among other reasons, gross misconduct.)

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Whats Really Going on in Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos? - The New York Times