CATEGORY:
Drug lab cleanup
Summary:
Fentanyl contamination can be extremely dangerous and requires specialized gear and experience to handle properly. Fentanyl is difficult to detect and can be transdermal, making it easy to accidentally inhale or come into contact with. Hiring a professional cleanup team is recommended for safety reasons, as they have the necessary gear and training to handle fentanyl safely. Additionally, exposure to fentanyl can quickly become a life or death matter, and trying to handle it on your own can put yourself and others at risk. Spaulding Decon specializes in cleaning up fentanyl contamination, biohazards, and water damage.
What if you were about to put your family or your coworkers in terrible danger and didn’t even know it?
Fentanyl contamination can put your entire home or business at serious risk. And the only thing that can make this contamination even worse is trying to clean it up yourself. That’s because most people don’t fully understand the dangers of fentanyl. That’s why you need to leave the cleanup to the professionals. Keep reading to learn more about these dangers and why you need to go with a pro!
The rest of our guide is going to help you learn why you need professionals in order to handle fentanyl cleanup. But the first thing you need to do is fully understand the dangers of fentanyl.
In some cases, fentanyl has proven to be 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. Even healthy and trained police officers have been rendered very sick by mild exposure to fentanyl at a crime scene. It’s one of the reasons that many police departments rely on training professions for cleaning up and disposing of fentanyl contamination.
Even if you are familiar with the dangers of many other drugs, fentanyl is on a different level altogether. And it requires the right combination of gear and experience to take care of it.
One of the simplest reasons why we recommend hiring professionals for cleaning up fentanyl is that it requires specialized gear. Most people and businesses don’t have this gear on hand, and by the time you buy all of it and learn to use it, it would have been quicker and cheaper to hire a professional team.
For example, one of the reasons we know about the dangers of fentanyl is from police raids. Things like flash-bang grenades can accidentally turn fentanyl airborne. At that point, simply walking through the area puts them at risk of fentanyl inhalation or unwanted contact on the skin.
At the bare minimum, proper safety gear includes respiratory equipment and powder-free nitrile gloves (of at least 5 mil strength). For maximum protection, it’s best to wear a double layer of gloves.
As we noted before, we understand the dangers of fentanyl in part because of cases where police officers have been accidentally exposed to it. But this brings us to an obvious question: what makes fentanyl hard to detect relative to other types of drugs?
The short answer is that fentanyl is transdermal and drug dealers use it in many ways, from turning it into pills like Vicodin and cutting heroin with it. And this process isn’t always clean, so you may have various surfaces and even the air in a room contaminated with this drug. Put it all together and you have a drug that is difficult to detect, can start doing damage right away, and is difficult to clean up. That’s why we recommend contacting a professional cleaner if you even suspect fentanyl or other drugs in an area.
Previously, we touched on the fact that law enforcement often relies on third-party professionals to test for fentanyl. There are actually several reasons for this. If you suspect fentanyl in your home or business, there is no way to safely test it onsite. Pretty much your only option for testing it is sending it to a lab. But any kind of movement of the fentanyl risks additional exposure.
Obviously, it’s possible to get the right equipment and undergo the right training so that you can move contaminated fentanyl to a lab for safe testing. But if we’re being honest, most people and businesses want a potential contamination removed as soon as humanly possible.
By hiring professionals for cleanup, you can simply make one phone call and watch the problem go away. It’s easy and convenient, but most importantly, it’s safe!
At this point, you may be skeptical about the idea of hiring a pro to deal with the dangers of fentanyl. After all, if you can buy gear on your own and go through the necessary training, why not take care of everything yourself? Ironically, there is some overlap between dealing with fentanyl and dealing with COVID-19. That’s because it all comes down to the PPE you are wearing.
You might think that it’s as simple as putting the PPE on and dealing with the fentanyl. Unfortunately, many people don’t know the right way to put PPE on, or they end up removing their gear way too quickly. As we learned with COVID-19, improper use of PPE puts you at a serious likelihood of contamination and infection. And it’s safer for everyone all around to let the professionals do their thing.
Perhaps the simplest reason you should hire professionals for fentanyl cleanup is this: exposure to the drug can quickly become a life or death matter! Depending on the level of exposure to fentanyl, you or others may be in danger of an overdose. And these overdoses have the possibility of turning fatal.
If someone has naloxone and knows how to use it, they can reverse the overdose and effectively save someone’s life from fentanyl. Unfortunately, most people don’t have naloxone on hand, much less the training to safely use it. The simple truth is that trying to deal with fentanyl on your own can kill you. Instead of putting yourself and others at risk of death, go ahead and let the professionals take care of everything.
Now you know more about the dangers of fentanyl. But do you know who can help make those dangers go away? We specialize in cleaning fentanyl contamination, dealing with biohazards, dealing with water damage, and so much more. To see what we can do for your home or business, just check out our many services today!
Learn more about the specific State by State regulations for drug lab cleanups, and how Spaulding Decon can help with the proper disinfection and decontamination of drug labs.
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