The White House is promoting a new fentanyl awareness ad campaign. “Make America Fentanyl Free” launched August 25, and though described only as “privately funded” it drops a lot of references to “working with President Trump” directly. While its website isn’t particularly ambitious in terms of written information, a lot more investment has clearly gone into the handful of PSA-style videos featuring actors in various stages of zombie makeup.
“Make America Fentanyl Free is more than just a slogan,” the website states. “It’s a call to action. We aim to empower individuals with the knowledge and tools necessary to understand the dangers of fentanyl. By clicking on our resources page, you will unlock important information that can help you and your community tackle this issue head-on.”
The resources page consists of the free hotlines for four national rehab organizations, plus the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, although MAFF has listed their suicide hotline instead of the one for drug use. (The number for American Addiction Centers is not the one that’s typically advertised, but a representative said the calls all route to the same place.)
MAFF very clearly exists to stoke the public’s appetite for border control, plus ancillary policies like mandatory minimums and civil commitment. But what really drives this home is that there is no call to action. There’s actually almost no way to engage with the campaign at all. It doesn’t ask for donations. There are no upcoming events. There’s a “Join the Fight” portal where you can submit your email address, but it doesn’t email you anything.
“It takes control of your body,” claims the narrator of one video, while in the background someone who presumably just used fentanyl howls like they’re turning into a werewolf. “Labored breathing, foaming at the mouth, painful itching, skin turns blue. The ‘fentanyl fold’ takes you.”
Fentanyl can make people itchy, yes. But just in the sense that opioids as a broad category make lots of people itchy, regardless of potency or whether they’re pharmaceutical versus street supply. You could also say the same of various antibiotics, or aspirin.
The acceptable term to use in place of “fentanyl fold” is “nodding out,” if you need to describe someone who’s standing but bent forward at the waist due to the sedative effects of drugs they’ve recently used, typically opioids but not necessarily. Nodding out isn’t the same thing as overdosing; generally speaking, someone still conscious and on their feet is not overdosing. In most parts of daily life there is no reason to touch a stranger without their consent, but, if you pass someone on the street who’s nodding out extra hard, a gentle nudge—gentle—and a “Hey, remember to breathe” is acceptable. Mostly because it works.
Skin, teeth, hair and overall youthfulness have always been strategic choices when trying to paint drug users as unhealthy. The common denominator is not drugs.
“I was immediately addicted to fentanyl, exactly like the drug dealers wanted. My skin turned blue. I aged rapidly. My organs painfully deteriorated. Then I died, alone.”
Dependence can sometimes develop quickly. But this is no more true of fentanyl than it is of any other potentially addictive substance, or potentially addictive behavior like gambling or sex.
By the same token, people who sell drugs are generally motivated to have a product that people will come back for, but this is the basic business practice for selling any consumable product, not just drugs. It’s why transnational drug-trafficking organizations are not terrorist groups—commercial motives are very different than ideological ones. And why, even without knowing anything about the drug war, it’s easy to see that the premise that people who knowingly sell fentanyl are murderers is not sound. No one makes a living by killing off their customers.
References to skin turning blue come up a few different times. It’s a distortion of one of the more commonly taught signs of opioid overdose, which is the victim’s lips and/or fingernails turning bluish-purple because there isn’t enough oxygen in their blood. Notably, this indicator skews toward white people, and sets up people with darker skin tones to be overlooked if their discoloration is more grayish.
There are other common substances that damage your liver or kidneys way more directly—alcohol, for example—but even in media or pop culture’s least-generous portrayals of people who use them, we don’t put them in zombie makeup. The final line about dying alone is one in a long list of obvious openings to talk about naloxone, or anything remotely related to overdose reversal or prevention, but that’s not the kind of thing MAFF is here to do.
“First my teeth started to rot. Then my skin turned blue. I started to age very rapidly. I lost my hair. My dignity. And every friend. And I will only be remembered as that drug user.”
Can fentanyl use wear down your tooth enamel? Sure. Opioids can cause dry mouth, a common side effect of all kinds of regulated and unregulated substances. Smoking drugs—fentanyl, meth, tobacco —can damage your teeth as well, we just tend to blame the drugs rather than the method of consumption. Or the social determinants of health that often play a larger role in dental hygiene, such as publicly subsidized food being mostly sugar and starch, or not being able to see a dentist for the past 20 years.
Skin, teeth, hair and overall youthfulness have always been strategic choices when trying to paint drug users—or anyone, really—as unhealthy, and therefore undeserving of social services that are better than what they currently have. The common denominator in all this isn’t drugs.
MAFF might as well have skipped the limited attempts at factual information, because no one would have missed them.
“Every prescription drug sold legally in America requires a warning detailing all serious side effects. Here are the warnings that would come with street fentanyl made by the Mexican drug cartels,” states the narrator in one of the videos. “Extreme nausea; vomiting; liver, heart and organ damage; dizziness; urinary retention; pupillary constriction; confusion; and respiratory depression. It can also cause horribly itchy skin that can lead to pulling your skin off. The inability to stand straight. Rapid aging. And your lips, tongue and skin turning blue. And there’s one more serious side effect street-bought fentanyl can cause: immediate death.”
Y’know which legal prescription drug carries a warning that actually includes all of these? Vivitrol, if you accept a couple of modest swaps like “urinary tract infection” instead of “urinary retention,” and “debridement of necrotic tissue [resulting] in significant scarring” instead of “pulling your skin off.”
There are some cursory attempts at fentanyl-related education, but only a few, including a bunch of references to the debunked myth that fentanyl is “laced” into marijuana. MAFF might as well have skipped the limited attempts at factual information, because no one would have missed them. Its wheelhouse is the tried-and-true propaganda tactic: Single out some behavior or characteristic that in reality is exhibited by lots of different people, and link it to one specific group of people as proof that they’re all the same.
Image via Make America Fentanyl Free/Twitter