Akton
New Member
The autopsy report now gives us the exact amount of fentanyl and norfentanyl (apparently a metabolite of fentanyl) that they found in Floyd's system. There is a claim being made frequently now that Floyd had as much as 4 times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system and so he would have died anyways even if he wasn't compressed:
Source: https://twitter.com/paulsperry_/status/1268579743399542785
Some of this jives with some interesting bits of information in the original criminal complaint against the cop who compressed his neck, which said that apparently he already was saying he was having trouble breathing before they began compressing his body:
Apparently before this he also was complaining about feeling "claustrophobic":
Link to the murder complaint:
https://www.startribune.com/read-th...auvin-in-the-death-of-george-floyd/570870791/
This is all being taken by some to mean that Floyd was basically already dying when he was subdued and therefore the officers are not responsible. Leaving aside the question of whether the officers would be legally responsible for his death in the case that he was entering into a medical emergency in their custody, I'm interested in trying to answer the question of whether or not the facts support the claim that he could have died from some sort of fentanyl overdose anyways due to already being intoxicated with a lethal dose
The full examiners report is here:
https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hen...-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf
It says that his blood concentration of fentanyl was 11 ng/mL and the concentration of the metabolite norfentanyl was 5.6 ng/mL.
I don't know enough about toxicology to know if we should think of those two numbers summed together or not.
Further down in the report there is a line that I believe is the origin of the idea that this is 4 times a lethal dose, where it says
This only gives a lower bound though and 3ng/mL might be a rare outlier.
I found one study that directly bore on this question:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576505/
It basically measures the blood fentanyl concentration of people who died "accidental" deaths (from overdose) and those who died natural deaths while taking fentanyl (as a prescription or otherwise).
This number for the "natural" group is also higher than that which Floyd supposedly had, indicating that he used the drug but had not taken an overdose-sized quantity.
However, the variation seems to be extremely high here. Table 4 of this study looks at other studies that had gathered relevant data and you can see on there that some people apparently had died "naturally" with blood concentrations as high as 81 ng/mL and there appears to be an extremely high amount of overlap between the values observed in those that died of overdose and those that died naturally, indicating that it is very hard to tell the cause of death from the blood concentration.
In the end, I don't feel like I can use the data to decide one way or another if this claim (that Floyd had taken a lethal dose of fentanyl and died from fentanyl overdose) is credible. I must admit the evidence does seem somewhat compatible with the claim but also I lack a lot of the specialized knowledge to make sense of this and the evidence is also more or less consistent with the claim being false. Does anyone else have more knowledge/expertise/intelligence they can apply to this question?
Source: https://twitter.com/paulsperry_/status/1268579743399542785
Some of this jives with some interesting bits of information in the original criminal complaint against the cop who compressed his neck, which said that apparently he already was saying he was having trouble breathing before they began compressing his body:
https://www.startribune.com/read-th...auvin-in-the-death-of-george-floyd/570870791/
This is all being taken by some to mean that Floyd was basically already dying when he was subdued and therefore the officers are not responsible. Leaving aside the question of whether the officers would be legally responsible for his death in the case that he was entering into a medical emergency in their custody, I'm interested in trying to answer the question of whether or not the facts support the claim that he could have died from some sort of fentanyl overdose anyways due to already being intoxicated with a lethal dose
The full examiners report is here:
https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hen...-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf
It says that his blood concentration of fentanyl was 11 ng/mL and the concentration of the metabolite norfentanyl was 5.6 ng/mL.
Further down in the report there is a line that I believe is the origin of the idea that this is 4 times a lethal dose, where it says
I found one study that directly bore on this question:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576505/
It basically measures the blood fentanyl concentration of people who died "accidental" deaths (from overdose) and those who died natural deaths while taking fentanyl (as a prescription or otherwise).
However, the variation seems to be extremely high here. Table 4 of this study looks at other studies that had gathered relevant data and you can see on there that some people apparently had died "naturally" with blood concentrations as high as 81 ng/mL and there appears to be an extremely high amount of overlap between the values observed in those that died of overdose and those that died naturally, indicating that it is very hard to tell the cause of death from the blood concentration.
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