“Every American in our country is at risk for this,” Green told the D.C.-area CPAC gathering in discussing the opioid crisis. “You pick up a dollar that’s got fentanyl on it and you’re dead.”
The claim about casual fatal contact with the synthetic opioid has been making the rounds and has been dismissed as a myth.
The notion also got fact-checked by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, which concluded: “It’s physically impossible to overdose from touching a dollar bill laced with fentanyl.”
In Green’s home state, a woman claims to have overdosed on fentanyl by picking up a dollar bill at a Nashville McDonald’s last summer. But that anecdote proved highly suspect, the fact-checking site Snopes wrote.
“The risk of significant fentanyl exposure through skin contact is extremely low,” Dr. Todd Korthuis, professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, told Snopes. “It’s important to correct this widely circulated myth.”