That was my take on Havana Syndrome. And it became clear to me after hearing some spook or other talk about how stressful their job was as evidence that there's no way they could be suffering from anxiety; they didn't believe they were susceptible to the stress.
My guess is that Havana Syndrome is a lot like Lyme disease. At first people thought it was just people complaining but then it became supported by science.
Yeah but there’s actually a tick bite involved with Lyme. We know about other tick borne diseases. Its a solid start point for medical research to begin with…
where as with Havana Syndrome we have to speculate about the mechanism of action, and introduction, and basically everything since there was nothing physical to go on beyond the patient’s physical symptoms, we have someone going “agh my brain”, and have to hunt around for answers.
And with this Fentanyl thing we’ve just got people strait up reacting wrong to a substance, full on placebo effect “high from smoking turf grass” type of reactions, except instead of a relatively harmless thing like a weed high we have significantly negative reactions displayed by the Law Enforcement Officers, so I suppose it’s technically the nocebo effect, and given the level of information we have about the substance, and the statistical sample of LEO that are presenting with the reactions, either becoming a cop somehow makes you allergic to fentanyl, or it’s in their damn heads …
and the problem is how to A: get this through to them, and B: prevent them using their social influence to spread this psychosomatic to the wider community. There’s a lot of evidence for how modern society has made us more vulnerable to social contagion like this, we’ve got media exposure priming us with the truth of how bad the world can be and how little we understand of some of it, we have social media spreading things based on engagement metrics that strongly correlate with our base instincts like fear of threats (real or perceived), and police have a significant influence in society due to their implicit position of trust with many governments deferring to police force’s advice on matters of crime and social issues (the appropriateness of this approach is extremely variable so this isn’t the place to discuss it at length, sometimes it’s good, sometimes the cops strait up abuse/manipulate this and politicians won’t fight it due to the pressure to avoid things like being labeled weak on crime)
So yeah maybe we get some funding and do some double blind trials recorded fully on video and show it to the cops as part of training. “You see this chalk powder, we’ve replaced it with fentanyl, let’s see if the cop can tell” … and then we show the counter example “we replaced this fentanyl with chalk powder, let’s see if the cop can tell”… I don’t think it will take long for them to stop wanting to look stupid.
It’s easy enough to explain away behaviour of officers in the field with things like “you can never know and have to treat everything as a real threat” and “we can’t show you all the other incidents where it really happened because that’s evidence part of an ongoing investigation that would be compromised by showing you it”. But I’m not sure how long this would hold up if you’re in a climate controlled lab where we can reassure them we’re doing this for science and to better protect them from the dangers of fentanyl. It’s important to not lie about the motivations but clever wording like this is pretty standard for this kind of experiment when it’s done, lying to the participants undermines your moral high ground when sharing the results with the community the participants are from (in this case LEOs)
