George Floyd did not die of a drug overdose. Why does misinformation about his death persist?

Five years ago, on May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, during an arrest.

A bystander’s video showed officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes as Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. The footage sparked weeks of global protests against police brutality and racism. It contributed to a jury’s murder conviction against Chauvin and a federal investigation into the police department.

Although ample evidence showed that Chauvin and police misconduct were to blame for Floyd’s death, another narrative quickly emerged — that Floyd died because of a drug overdose, not because of Chauvin’s actions.

Five years later, that falsehood is central to calls for President Donald Trump to pardon Chauvin. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for example, recently revived her longstanding, and long-debunked, take that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death. 

"I strongly support Derek Chauvin being pardoned and released from prison," Greene wrote in a May 14 X post. "George Floyd died of a drug overdose."

In 2021, a Minnesota jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Chauvin also pleaded guilty to twice violating a federal criminal civil rights statute — once against Floyd and once against a 14-year-old in 2017. The state and federal sentences, which Chauvin is serving concurrently, each exceeded 20 years.

In 2023, following a two-year investigation sparked by Floyd’s death, the Justice Department found that the City of Minneapolis and its police department engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations, including use of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against Black and Native American people. 

The narrative that Floyd died of an overdose persisted through the involved police officers’ criminal trials and beyond their convictions, in part because powerful political critics of the racial justice movement sought to rewrite history with false claims. It was one of many false statements about Floyd’s actions, his criminal history and the protests that followed his murder.

Experts said systemic racism contributes also to the inaccurate narratives’ proliferation and staying power.

"The core through-line that emerges is the kind of long-standing, deep racist narratives around Black criminality," Rachel Kuo, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies race, social movements and technology said of the falsehoods. "And also the ways people try to justify who is or isn’t an ‘innocent victim.’"

The summer 2020 protests built on 2014 and 2016 protests against police brutality — but with Floyd’s case as a catalyst, racial justice advocates achieved wider, global visibility and corporate attention, Kuo said.

That visibility came with a price. 

When people of color achieve visibility for their social movement or political demand, an effort to delegitimize those demands quickly follows, Kuo said. Misinformation plays a part by trying to "chip away" at the belief that what happened to Floyd was unjust or undermine the protest movement overall, she said.

How conservative influencers distorted an autopsy report’s detail to push overdose claim

Chauvin killed Floyd after police were called to a corner grocery store where Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill. News reports about Floyd’s criminal record — which included three drug charges, two theft cases, aggravated robbery and trespassing — fueled false claims about his background. 

Two autopsy reports — one performed by Hennepin County’s medical examiner and one Floyd's family ordered — concluded Floyd’s death was a homicide. Although they pointed to different causes of death, neither report said he died because of an overdose. 

The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office reported "fentanyl intoxication" and "recent methamphetamine use," among "other significant conditions" related to his death, but it did not say drugs killed him. It said Floyd "experienced a cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained by law enforcement officer." The autopsy ordered by Floyd’s family concluded Floyd died of asphyxiation, or suffocation.

Nevertheless, the Hennepin County autopsy report’s fentanyl detail provided kindling for the drug overdose narrative to catch fire. We first fact-checked this narrative when it was published on a conservative blog in August 2020.

As Chauvin’s trial neared in early 2021, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson wrongly told his millions of viewers that Floyd’s autopsy showed he "almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl." 

Conservative influencer Candace Owens amplified the false narrative in March 2021. Lawyers defending Chauvin argued drug use was a more primary cause of death than the police restraint, but jurors were unconvinced. 

Chauvin’s 2021 conviction didn’t spell the end for misinformation about Floyd’s death. The drug overdose narrative emerged again in late 2022, as the trial neared for two other police officers charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death. 

Misinformation experts said it’s not surprising that Floyd and the 2020 protests remain a target of false portrayals years later because of the widespread attention Floyd’s death drew at a time when online platforms incentivize inflammatory commentary.

"Marginalized groups have been prime targets of misinformation going back hundreds, even thousands of years," because falsehoods can be weaponized to demonize, harm and further  oppress and discriminate, said Deen Freelon, a University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication professor who studies digital politics with a focus on race, gender, ideology and other identity dimensions in social media. 

He said Floyd’s murder was a magnet for mis- and disinformation because it "fits the mold of a prominent event that ties into controversial, long-running political issues," similar to events such as the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the coronavirus pandemic.

Conservative activists and politicians with large followings have continued to target Floyd and the 2020 protest.

The drug overdose narrative proliferated in conjunction with the October 2022 release of Owens’ film about Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, titled "The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM." Rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, parroted the false narrative in an October 2022 podcast interview, citing Owens’ film. 

In October 2023, Carlson repeated the false drug overdose narrative; that X video has since received over 23.5 million views. In December 2023, Greene reshared a different Carlson video with the caption, "George Floyd died from a drug overdose."

Ramesh Srinivasan, an information studies professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, said social media algorithms don’t allow for nuanced conversations that require detail and context — important for productive discussion about what happened in summer 2020. 

A person’s online visibility and virality — which can directly correlate to revenue in some cases — improves when a person takes extreme, antagonistic, partisan or hardened positions, he said. 

"Those conditions have propped up certain people who specialize in the peddling of troll-type content, of caricatured content, of deliberately false content," Srinivasan said. 

Freelon said the internet has "added fuel to the fire" and broadened misinformation’s reach. 

"So it’s important to remain vigilant against misinformation," he said, "not only because lies are inherently bad, but also because the people who bear the harm have often historically suffered disproportionately from prejudice and mistreatment."

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.