Cop Fentanyl Overdose Myth Amplified by Ludicrous Fort Dodge Messenger Story

There's just one problem with the paper's harrowing tale of a cop's "brush with death": It couldn't possibly have happened

As part of a series "examining the fentanyl crisis" and its impact in Iowa, the Fort Dodge Messenger newspaper published an incredibly irresponsible article last Thursday by reporter Kelby Wingert that tells the implausible story of a former police officer who claims to have overdosed on fentanyl just by being in its vicinity.

The fanciful story is rare for Iowa but one among many across the nation of cops who have dubiously reported being the victims of fentanyl overdoses while in the line of duty. A quick Google search could have shown Wingert or her editor that these tales have all been debunked for the simple fact that they're all based on claims that are toxicologically impossible.

Wingert's article relies entirely on the account of the former Fort Dodge cop, Chris Weiland, who pulled over a young woman in March 2019 for "driving far too slow," discovered she gave him a fake name, and searched her vehicle after supposedly smelling marijuana inside it. He found a small travel bag and took it back to his patrol car where it was warmer. "As Weiland searched the bag," Wingert explains, "he found a small box which contained a small plastic bag of white powder. He briefly opened the box to look inside and then shut it and put it back into the travel bag."

This is when Weiland convinced himself he'd been drugged. After arresting the driver and en route to the station to book her, he recalls, "I remember looking down the street and it’s like my eyes were kind of playing with me, like the road was growing a mile long." Then he began to cough. Concerned, he radioed a dispatcher. "After that, I woke up in the ER. So apparently, according to the video, I drove for a block and a half to the [station]." Body cam and police car cameras reportedly showed him arriving at the station but struggling to park his vehicle.

He was soon pulled from his car and helped onto a gurney, because he "couldn’t stand on his own by that time," then rushed to the hospital where, according to his story, he was given comical amounts of Narcan (a name brand for the overdose reversal drug naloxone) to save him from what Wingert described as a harrowing "brush with death." ("A physician told Weiland later that he had depleted the entire supply of Narcan that was kept in the ER, and then he had to be hooked up to an IV drip of Narcan overnight while in the ICU. He also received two doses of Narcan in the ambulance while on the way to the hospital.")

The only problem with this story? None of it possibly could have been caused by fentanyl. "This has never happened," Dr. Ryan Marino, a Case Western Reserve University toxicologist and emergency room physician, told NPR for a report aired in May debunking the phenomenon of cops who tell stories like Weiland's. "There has never been an overdose through skin contact or accidentally inhaling fentanyl." Brandon Del Pozo, a former police chief who now studies drug addiction at Brown University, agreed: "There's never been a toxicologically confirmed case. The idea of it hanging in the air and getting breathed in is highly, highly implausible — it's nearly impossible." NPR reporters reached out to police departments for toxicology reports or other evidence confirming stories of cops who allegedly overdosed from being in the vicinity of fentanyl powder. None provided any, because the evidence does not exist.

There is, however, an explanation for Weiland's experience and others like his. Speaking to Dr. Lewis S. Nelson, who runs the Division of Medical Toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, the NJ Spotlight News also reported on the subject in May in an article titled, "Fentanyl myth: Police cry overdose, facts prove otherwise."

As the article's author, Ian T. Shearn, wrote: "There is no sinister motive in play, Nelson explains. It’s more of a matter of certain factions digging in and the news media reporting what they say without question. Officers seen in the videos are not faking it, he stresses. What’s happening in these so-called overdose incidents, he said, is a reasonable psychosomatic response to a false narrative that turned caution into mass hysteria. It is an assessment widely held in the scientific community."

Indeed, the symptoms explained by Weiland are consistent with what almost certainly really happened: He had a panic attack, a bout of acute anxiety triggered by his irrational fear of fentanyl. Both the NPR and the Spotlight News reports attribute this in no small part to organizations like the federal Drug Enforcement Agency that have perpetuated the myths that fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin or from airborne particles in high enough concentrations to cause overdoses despite strong criticism from medical experts who have rightly countered that no evidence has ever existed to support the claims.

"If this drug was as dangerous as they say it is, every cop in America would be dead, every user would be dead," Nelson told the Spotlight News.

Even so, it's pretty clear that the Fort Dodge Police Department has taken this misinformation to heart — something that should call into question their basic compentency in adequately responding to members of their community suffering from actual overdoses. "A question Weiland has gotten several times over the last four years, he said, is why didn’t the substance affect [the woman], who was sitting in the back seat of the patrol vehicle when he opened the box with the powder," Wingert writes. Weiland's response betrays his fundamental lack of understanding about how fentanyl works: "She's built a tolerance to it."

The Messenger newsroom was not the first gullible enough to fall for Weiland's tall tale. It was previously featured on the national subscription TV network Investigation Discovery's Body Cam series. On the episode about his experience, Fort Dodge's current police chief, Dennis Quinn, in dramatic fashion lends credence to Weiland's mistaken belief that he was poisoned by fentanyl.

Amusingly, Weiland undermines what scant credibility his own narrative might otherwise have in an attempt to fact-check the Body Cam episode when speaking with Wingert: "One thing the 'Body Cam' TV show got wrong, Weiland said. [sic] Is that he did not 'sniff' the substance he found in the bag." This, coupled with the reporting that the powder was inside a bag when he examined it, suggests that he was unlikely even to have touched it with his skin or accidentally inhaled any of it.

Now, here's the kicker: Wingert's article later reveals that the white powder Weiland supposedly OD'd on never even tested positive as fentanyl! In a paragraph that is otherwise completely factually inaccurate, she writes: "Although testing was never able to definitively prove the unknown powdery substance was fentanyl, Weiland’s symptoms were consistent with those of fentanyl exposure. The Narcan is what helped revive him, indicating the substance was some type of opioid."

This alone should have been enough to either kill the story or, better yet, use it as an opportunity to draw attention to the widespread misinformation that's arisen from the phenomenon among police officers of mistaking panic attacks for fentanyl overdoses. After all, the Messenger series is supposed to be raising awareness about the drug's real impact, and repeating misinformation about it accomplishes the opposite of what it set out to do. Citing Weiland, Wingert falsely states "that in the context of transporting fentanyl in a vehicle, anyone who has contact with that vehicle for any reason — traffic stop, medical emergency and even car maintenance — is at risk for being exposed."

This misinformation could literally prove deadly. "I have seen this play out in reality where someone who is truly experiencing an overdose, overdosed on fentanyl, will not be resuscitated appropriately or in a timely manner because of this fear that getting close to them or touching them could cause some kind of second hand overdose," Marino told NPR.

Even beyond all this, the rest of Weiland's story is full of glaring red flags that are breathlessly retold throughout the article without a hint of skepticism.

Weiland claims he found the white powder after smelling marijuana in the driver's vehicle, "which gave him probable cause to search it." The article states this claim as a fact but nowhere does it say whether he even found any pot. Online court records show that the driver was charged with a class C felony for a controlled substance violation that was pleaded down to a class D felony. Without visiting the Webster County courthouse to look over the actual documents filed in the case (which a local reporter easily could have done), it's unclear what the controlled substance was. But in Iowa, pot possession is a misdemeanor — and the driver was charged with her first offense for that in a separate incident four and a half months later (the charge was dismissed).

In the article, Weiland also says the driver was "just not acting right" — implying he thought she was on drugs — as a reason for the search, but there does not appear to be an operating while intoxicated charge in the court records to support this, either. If Weiland didn't find marijuana, did he lie about smelling it as a pretext to conduct the search? (Cops do this all the time.) Or did he just imagine that he smelled it, like he imagined overdosing?

The article provides no clarity on any of this despite making a point of naming the driver, who is essentially being falsely accused in it of poisoning Weiland. This raises a separate question about journalistic ethics: What value is there in publishing the name of a private figure and dredging up what was likely a miserable time in her life from nearly five years ago? Why was the officer's story apparently not scrutinized in the slightest, at the very least, for her sake?

Other details in the article, as I touched on earlier, call into question the competence of Fort Dodge police officers, and possibly other local officials as well. Why is the department's current police chief still supporting Weiland's false narrative about fentanyl years later and despite national news reports featuring exasperated medical experts stressing that it's dangerously wrong? Do county prosecutors and judges share the police department's mistaken understanding of fentanyl, and could this have been a factor in why the driver ultimately pleaded guilty to a felony count of drug possession rather than having the charge dismissed?

The article also says that Weiland "medically retired from law enforcement in 2021" and goes to some length in describing the trauma Weiland says he endured after the incident that he believes tarred him as a "tainted" officer whose mental struggles were ignored by others. As experts have explained, people like Weiland aren't faking their symptoms but rather mistaking panic attacks and other psychosomatic responses for drug overdoses. That said, medical retirement typically means that the retiree is receiving disability benefits, which in Weiland's case would probably be taxpayer-funded. That may deserve more scrutiny: Are the people responsible for approving these benefits aware that the former officer does not properly understand what happened to him? Was he correctly diagnosed?

Weiland's hospital experience also raises some pretty important but unaddressed questions.  Was he ever tested for fentanyl exposure? ("The misinformation persists, Nelson says, because there is no data to analyze," the Spotlight News reported. "Hospitals don’t test for fentanyl when first responders and others are treated for suspected overdose, a practice that could bring scientific fact to the fore.")

Was any effort made to confirm Weiland's claim that he exhausted the ER's entire supply of Narcan? How much Narcan was that? Naloxone shortages have been a major problem across the country in recent years. The previous article in Wingert's fentanyl series describes efforts by a local reverend to raise money for more Narcan soon after Weiland's experience. It also reports that Quinn, the police chief, said "officers have had to use Narcan many times over the last couple years." If Weiland truly depleted all of the ER's Narcan, did this prevent anyone who was actually suffering an overdose from getting lifesaving treatment?

The Messenger article is an act of journalistic malpractice. But it could also be taught in journalism classes as a fantastic example of the widespread problem of local reporters who treat cops' words as gospel despite the obvious fact that they routinely embellish the truth or outright lie, or simply lack the proper education to speak with any authority on certain topics. Reporters who don't acknowledge this are doing a disservice to their readers and communities that can cause real harm, and it's my genuine hope that someone at the newspaper reads what I've written here, acknowledges the many flaws in their reporting on fentanyl, and reexamines their editorial standards and reporting practices.