Police in Dauphin County, Penn., will no longer conduct field tests on confiscated drugs for fear of accidentally overdosing on fentanyl, PennLive reported Monday.
Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico recently issued the directive following reports in other parts of the country of police officers who got sick after handling fentanyl, which comes in the form of a white powdery substance and is more potent than morphine and heroin.
"Normally they would put a small amount of that into what we call a field test kit to make sure that it was a controlled substance," Marsico told Fox43 News. "Because of the dangers involved and the risk associated with that, we advised the police to stop doing those field tests."
Limited exposure to the drug can result in a potential overdose, says Matthew Null, a referral development manager with Gaudenzie, a nonprofit organization that offers drug and alcohol addiction treatment and recovery services at facilities in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.
"It's not where someone is necessarily smoking it or injecting it, but just coming in contact with your hands because your hands being porous, it's going to get into your blood system, or by inhaling it, and that’s where the danger occurs," said Null.
Drug samples will instead be submitted to the Pennsylvania State Police lab for testing.
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