Toxicologists explain the medical impossibility of overdosing by touching opioids.

In the middle of May, a police officer in East Liverpool, Ohio, Chris Green, was responding to a traffic call when he realized that white powder had spilled inside the car he was investigating. “ ‘No way I’m overdosing,’ I thought.” He would go on to receive four doses of naloxone, an emergency drug that counteracts an opioid overdose, before waking up. If Green’s story is true, it would be the first reported case of an overdose caused solely by unintentional skin contact with an opioid. In fact, according to Jeanmarie Perrone, M.D., director of the division of medical toxicology in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, “the American College of Medical Toxicology has drafted a position statement about the possible routes of fentanyl exposure, debunking the likelihood that transdermal fentanyl absorption is clinically significant.” The spread of Green’s story inspired the group to accelerate the timeline for releasing its policy statement, Perrone says. That’s an enormous quantity—in fact it is approximately one-third of the antidote that would be used to revive someone who had received an entire “carfentanil dart,” commonly called an “elephant tranquilizer.” The proffered explanation for why such a large dose of the antidote was needed is that Green had simply encountered that extreme a quantity of opioid.