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A woman who stopped to pick up a discarded dollar bill from the sidewalk passed out only minutes later.
On July 10, Renee Parsons saw the dollar bill on the ground outside of a McDonald's on Highway 70, Tennessee, and picked it up. Almost immediately, her speech began to slur and she felt numb, before eventually losing consciousness.
"I couldn't even breathe. It's almost like a burning sensation, if you will, that starts here at your shoulders, and then it just goes down because it's almost like it's numbing your entire body," Parsons told WKRN.
Parsons grabbed the arm of her husband, Justin Parsons, with the same hand that she had picked up the money with as he drove her to the hospital. Strangely, soon afterwards, her husband also began to experience similar symptoms.
"My lips started going numb and my arm broke out in a rash," Justin told WKRN.
His side effects faded after around an hour, while it took about four hours for Renee to feel normal again.
"She looked like she was dying. She certainly was unconscious and very pale," he said.
Renee was eventually released from the hospital with the incident filed as an accidental overdose.
The family fear that the dollar bill may have been coated in fentanyl or something similar, however their toxicology report didn't test for synthetic drugs. They are concerned that something similar may occur in the future with a child, who may not be able to recover from their overdose in the same manner that fully grown adults can.
While the responding police officer told the family that the dollar may have been used to cut drugs, a spokesperson for Metro Nashville Police told WKRN that there hadn't been any grains observed on the dollar before it was destroyed.
Experts say that you cannot overdose from a drug like fentanyl just by touching it: it has to enter your bloodstream first.
In response to a similar case from 2017, when a police officer wiped some white powder off his uniform before losing consciousness, Lewis S. Nelson, director of the Division of Medical Toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, said that it is nearly impossible to overdose on fentanyl in this manner.
"With a very large dermal exposure (which did not occur) for a prolonged time (did not occur) it is conceivable that one could be exposed to a significant amount of fentanyl," Nelson told Reuters. "But even the pharmaceutical fentanyl patch, which is formulated for such absorption, takes 12-16 hours before a significant blood fentanyl concentration is reached."
He said that rather than being a result of a fentanyl overdose, the mysterious reactions may in fact be psychological.
"All of the findings that we see on this, and other videos, are inconsistent with fentanyl poisoning and are fully consistent with a stress/anxiety response."
However, in the case of the Parsons, they did not report seeing anything on the dollar bill that may have triggered an anxiety-driven psychological reaction, often referred to as a "nocebo".
Regardless, Nick Weems, the Perry County Sheriff, warned in June that there had been three cases of money found with fentanyl inside of it in the previous month, and urged children not to pick up money lying on the ground.
"I've heard that you can and you can't [overdose from touching fentanyl], but I don't want to take that chance. Especially, I don't want to take that chance with our children in our community," he told WKRN.
Update 7/12/22, 3:40 p.m. ET: The headline of this story was updated for clarity.
About the writer
Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more