Republicans are suddenly concerned that just being near a drug will turn you into a foaming-at-the-mouth addict. The National Chairperson of the Republican party acts as if she believes that touching a fentanyl pill can kill someone. She heard it from another not-a-doctor, right?
Doctors and science are pretty straightforward. You can not die from touching a pill. If you could transdermally absorb the drug so quickly and effectively that swallowing the pill, or injecting it, would be unnecessary then you should assume hospitals would not tell you to swallow the pill, let alone an injection.
"If you could absorb drugs by touching them, why would people bother to inject them?" said Dr. Andrew Stolbach, a medical toxicologist and emergency physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He also is an expert on the subject of fentanyl exposure.
"Drugs like fentanyl and analogs of fentanyl aren't absorbed through the skin very well at all," Stolbach said. "So brief, incidental contact isn't going to cause somebody to absorb a therapeutic dose, let alone a toxic dose."
