Christopher Peak Photo
NHPD’s new fentanyl kits, including gloves, a sleeve, a respirator mask, a biohazard container and a baggie.
Every New Haven police officer will now have the equipment to handle small doses of fentanyl, a highly potent drug that has sickened cops and nurses who’ve come into contact with it.
Last week the department placed kits in every shift commander’s vehicle with protective gear to handle minor amounts of the synthetic opioid, which the coroner found responsible for 57 percent of the state’s fatal drug overdoses last year. On Thursday the department started to roll the kits out to every patrol cruiser.
Officers will still be directed to contact headquarters for any significant quantities of fentanyl.
While there’s debate about how just how dangerous it is to touch the drug, the department’s kits should keep officers safe while they’re encountering the drug on the front lines of an opioid crisis.
The boxes contain cautionary instructions and all the materials that officers need to safely dispose fentanyl, said Karizma Schloss, the quartermaster who procures all the department’s weapons, uniforms and other supplies,
When officers first come into contact with small doses of fentanyl, they should suit up with nitrile gloves (an industrial-strength that can handle corrosive materials), a Tyvek protective sleeve, and a respirator mask, Schloss said. The officer should place the drug — even if it’s still in a syringe or a pipe — inside an airtight shuttle, and then put that within another sealable plastic bag for extra protection, she added.
The materials can be disposed of in a biohazard bin at the Union Avenue headquarters, where they will later be hauled off by a contractor, Schloss said.
Spector shows how small a fatal fentanyl dose can be, at recent New Haven conference.
Fentanyl, a painkiller that is orders of magnitude stronger than morphine, was prescribed by doctors as patches or lollipops. It now shows up more regularly on the street, sometimes mixed in with heroin, according to agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“I never saw fentanyl in the first 25 years of my career. It’s something we’d never dealt with,” Jon Rubinstein, the state’s DEA supervisor, said at a recent New Haven conference on opioids. “Now it’s coming into Connecticut every day, shipped from China and Mexico to mailboxes around the state. It’s as common as cocaine in the 80s and 90s: It’s everywhere.”
DEA agents were recently prohibited from conducting field tests on fentanyl, because of how dangerous the drug is. The former DEA chief, Chuck Rosenberg, recounted multiple stories of authorities being harmed by the drug, such as when a Hartford SWAT team’s use of flash-bang grenades in a September 2016 raid on a stash house put 11 officers in the hospital.
“It’s too dangerous,” Rosenberg said at the recent conference. “It can kill you to the touch.”
That story took off this May when a cop in East Liverpool, Ohio, after he encountered fentanyl in a traffic stop. Back at the police station, an hour later, he was feeling sick. Someone pointed out some powder on his shirt, suspected to be the drug’s residue. The cop wiped it off. Within minutes, “I started talking weird. I slowly felt my body shutting down. I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t respond. I was in total shock. ‘No way I’m overdosing,’ I thought,” patrolman Chris Green told the local paper. Four doses of Narcan, an antidote that reverses overdoses, were reportedly needed to revive him.
Toxicologists, however, find the story dubious, pointing out that administering four doses of naloxone for a minimal exposure probably meant that doctors were treating the wrong ailment.
The American College of Medical Toxicology (ACMT), a group of 700 experts on poisonings, agreed in an official position statement, “Toxicity cannot occur from simply being in proximity of the drug.” Skin contact can simply be washed off, the group said.
ACMT recommended that first responders should exercise caution when handling unknown drugs, but they questioned whether some police departments might actually be putting their officers at risk with bulky, unnecessary equipment during high-stakes scenarios. AMCT said that, for “routine handling of these drugs, nitrile gloves provide simple protection”; masks and face shields are only necessary in exceptional circumstances, the organization added.
Are NHPD officers carrying naloxone/narcan kits yet?
Last it was reported they were "exploring it" and getting push back from the police & fire-fighters unions.
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/cops_narcan/