Fentanyl is real and what you hear is true!

[Hugh_Lebowski]

129. I'm well aware of the relative potency of fentanyl NNadir.

If you look through my comments on this thread you'll find I point out that fact in a few different places.

However, cops routinely wear rubber gloves when going through belongings where anything hazardous may be in play in the contents. That also avoids fingerprint contamination.

I'm not gonna sit here and say there's no possibility of danger in physically handling the stuff under any circumstances, but real trouble would require special circumstances, including a hefty dose of what I'd call negligence, the intersection of which I'd say is unlikely in the real world.

Maybe it's happened a handful times in the US that someone in LE inadvertently got a active dose of fentanyl in their duties, I'd buy that due to the potency of the drug. But I don't buy it's a serious problem because in the illicit trade, it's found in powder and pill form, and the cops almost always know they're involved in a 'drug bust' and would likely take precautions, and those forms are unlikely to be absorbed thru skin, especially not rapidly ... your 'hand cream' hypothesis would involve the cop neither wearing gloves, nor even washing up after going thru evidence in an opioid bust.

The fact that its produced illegally and is of unknown concentration does not really speak to your point, because the studies you're citing are going to based on the Rx-grade 'stuff', are they not?

The backyard stuff is going to be LESS potent in the vast majority of cases, and almost certainly never MORE pure.

The biggest problem with that drug, apart from making properly measured doses of it in an illicit environment, without proper lab-grade equipment?

It's that 'the high' is for shit compared to opiates and semi-synthetic opioids like oxydocone, yet the respiratory depressant effect remains profound. People are dying because the ratio of 'high' to 'dangerous respiratory depression' is terribly low with Fentanyl, leading to dangerous re-dosing.