Representative Mark Green (R-Tenn.), a physician, dubiously claimed at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday that touching fentanyl on a dollar bill can kill you. (Watch the video below.)
That led to a diagnosis of “idiocy” on Twitter.
“Every American in our country is at risk because of this,” Green told the DC-area CPAC meeting while discussing the opioid crisis. “You pick up a dollar with fentanyl on it and you’re dead.”
The claim of accidental lethal contact with the synthetic opioid is circulating and dismissed as a myth.
“You can’t overdose on fentanyl by touching a doorknob or a dollar bill,” says Daniel Colby, co-medical director in UC-Davis Health’s Department of Emergency Medicine.
The idea was also fact-checked by PolitiFact of the Poynter Institute, which concluded, “It is physically impossible to overdose by touching a dollar bill with fentanyl.”
In Green’s home state, a woman claims to have overdosed on fentanyl by picking up a dollar bill from a McDonald’s in Nashville last summer. But that anecdote turned out to be highly suspicious, the fact-checking site Snopes wrote.
“The risk of significant exposure to fentanyl through skin contact is extremely low,” Dr. Todd Korthuis, professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, told Snopes. “It is important to correct this widely held myth.”
Some Twitter users wrote down a reality check for Green, a far-right ideologue with a history of homophobic remarks who has tried to blame US border policy for the spread of fentanyl:
