Zach on why cops are snorting Narcan like cocaine after bogus "fentanyl exposure"

(And me on the shit show happening in San Francisco).

It’s no secret that the New York Times has gone downhill in recent years, after the exodus of its bravest, and most talented truthteller, Bari Weiss, and the firing of the editor who published a Tom Cotton editorial saying cops should be allowed to kill protestors or something.

But Jesus. Did they run out of reporters? Will they publish just anybody?

Even Zach!?!?!?

JK! Obviously. Zach just published a great story in the Gray Lady looking at the absurd phenomenon of police overdosing on fentanyl after it looked at them funny. Zach writes:

For the past five years, I’ve watched a bizarre news cycle play out on repeat. The most recent recurrence began on June 16, when KCTV5, a local news organization in Kansas City, Mo., published police body-camera footage under a dramatic headline: “ ‘I Knew I Was Dying’: How 5 Rounds of Narcan Possibly Saved KCK Police Officer’s Life.” The operative word in that sentence is “possibly.” The footage shows a police officer standing on a snowy lawn in what looks like a suburban neighborhood, wearing sunglasses and disposable gloves, inspecting pills stashed inside a crumpled piece of paper. “Seal it up — that’s fentanyl, dude,” another officer says. “Get that in a bag quick, so we don’t have an exposure.” The time stamp on the video then jumps to five minutes later. The officer who held the pills is now collapsed on the ground, limbs splayed as though making a snow angel. We hear another officer yell, “Narcan, Narcan, Narcan!” The fallen officer gasps rapidly as his fellow officers, with what seems like genuine panic, spray the opioid-overdose antidote up his nose several times.

The officer was taken to a nearby hospital and later released, and, like clockwork, the vivid footage began circulating. But there’s one major problem with all this: It’s nearly impossible for the symptoms depicted to have been caused by “fentanyl exposure.” The scientific literature shows, definitively, that brief contact with fentanyl is not sufficient for it to enter the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier to cause such a rapid overdose.

Read the full story here.

Meanwhile, in The Intercept, I published a story about how you really shouldn’t fuck with progressive prosecutors because they will talk to reporters and call your appointment Trumpian:

A WEEK AFTER she was sworn in as San Francisco’s interim district attorney, Brooke Jenkins fired 15 people, many of them hired by her predecessor, Chesa Boudin. Jenkins quit her job in the DA’s office in 2021 to become the liberal face of the recall movement that ousted Boudin.

When critics pointed out that the campaign was spearheaded by Republican millionaires and billionaires, Jenkins stood out as a self-professed progressive, and a woman of color, who claimed that Boudin had gone too far: coddling criminals, failing victims, and mismanaging the DA’s office.

Boudin’s critics were elated when Jenkins was nominated. “SF’s radical DA replaced with a great moderate,” former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles wrote. The San Francisco Police Officers Association described Jenkins as “a qualified, competent, and compassionate prosecutor who will allow San Francisco to turn the page from the previous criminal defense attorney masquerading as the DA.”

But staffers in the DA’s office who spoke to The Intercept last week were not quite as pleased by Jenkins’s appointment. They suspected that Jenkins was picked because of her loyalty to Mayor London Breed. A representative from the mayor’s office sat in on Jenkins’s first meeting with the team, raising concerns that the representative was looking to gauge who among them would hew to Jenkins’s — and by extension Breed’s — agenda.

Read the full story here.

xoxo gossip girl.