Volunteer firefighter John Boman is battling a blaze in his native Ohio that water cannot extinguish.

He is a criminologist, operating at ground zero of the American opioid crisis. But unlike a fire, where the damage is immediate and visible, the devastation in Toledo is microscopic and spreading with the terrifying quiet of a fungal spore.

But Boman’s latest research has produced a plot twist that no one saw coming—a discovery that bridges the gap between the grim streets of the Rust Belt and the sterile hope of the laboratory. In a stroke of scientific irony, Boman—who joined the School of Public Affairs as a research professor ahead of the fall 2025 semester—has discovered a potential cure for a deadly, drug-related infection in the very soil of the communities being ravaged by the epidemic.

To understand the magnitude of Boman’s work, however, one must first understand the battlefield.

Ohio is arguably the state hit hardest by the country’s drug crisis. While West Virginia may hold higher per capita death rates, the Buckeye State’s sheer volume of loss is staggering: over 41,000 fatal overdoses between 2014 and 2023. For a population of just 11.8 million, the reality is sobering. In recent years, drug overdoses have eclipsed traffic fatalities, suicides, and other accidents to become the state’s leading cause of preventable death.

“We’re competing with California, Florida, Texas, New York”—states with double and triple the population of Ohio, Boman explains. “That’s not a list that we want to be on.”

The epicenter of this crisis is Toledo, the seat of Lucas County. Perched on the western edge of Lake Erie, the city is marked by the crumbling factory world of the Rust Belt, where the loss of industry has left behind deep socio-structural wounds. While Boman notes that Lucas County has the fifth-highest “body count” in Ohio over the last decade, he says the vast majority of those overdose deaths are concentrated in Toledo. To combat the severity of the problem, the health department distributed more than 280,000 clean needles in 2023.

But it was the needles coming back that captivated Boman’s curiosity. The drug crisis is not a partisan issue. As Boman puts it, “This is a purple problem”—and one for which everyone, in red states and blue, wants a solution. But such complexity required a new kind of thinking.

It started in 2022 as many great ideas do—over a beer. Boman, then a professor at Bowling Green State University, and Hans Wildschutte, a fellow faculty member and microbiologist, were discussing the increasingly toxic mixture of drugs appearing on the street—fentanyl mixed with cocaine and new synthetic agents. Wildschutte knew Boman worked with the county health department and threw out a wild idea: “Let’s go get some of their needles.”

It was a simple, albeit gritty, proposition. Boman drove to the department and asked for a small batch of used drug needles—just a few of the 30,000 or so that are recovered by health or government officials each year. They handed him a red sharps container filled with used syringes, which Boman unceremoniously tossed into the trunk of his car.

“John is a great collaborator, and we established a unique collaboration”—interdisciplinary in spirit and innovative in its methods, says Wildschutte.

Back in the lab, Wildschutte developed a protocol to flush the syringes with saline and dispense the wash into vials. Then they repeated the whole process with even more dirty needles. 

This time, however, they sent the vials for analysis to the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education in Philadelphia, which frequently works with the National Institutes of Health and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The results were a terrifying look into the modern chemistry of addiction.

According to the analysis—published in August 2025 in PLOS One, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal—the average syringe contained 7.8 different narcotics. Out of roughly 130 tested, only one syringe contained a single drug. The rest were what Boman and Wildschutte termed “polysubstance cocktails”—mixtures that revealed a calculated, predatory sophistication among street-level mixologists.

“The amateur drug chemists of the world are pretty clever critters,” Boman says dryly. “What they’re trying to do is get people as high as possible without letting them die.”

By mixing uppers and downers, dealers create a physiological tug-of-war that deepens addiction and maximizes the high before the body shuts down. As many as six different types of fentanyl, which slows down lung function, were found in 98 percent of syringes. Cocaine, a stimulant added to keep the user’s heart rate and blood pressure up—thus allowing them to tolerate even more fentanyl—was detected in 90 percent of syringes, while 86 percent had xylazine, a now-ubiquitous horse tranquilizer.

But the most chilling discovery wasn’t the drugs—it was the deadly life festering on the syringes.

For decades, public health messaging regarding dirty needles has focused on viruses: HIV and hepatitis. But Boman’s team found something else, something new—and arguably more terrifying.

Before he plunged the needles and shipped them to Philadelphia, Wildschutte had dragged them through common biomedia, a nutrient-rich substance that acts as food for bacteria. He and Boman expected to find staphylococcus or its methicillin-resistant variety known as MRSA, potentially deadly but also curable with antibiotics. Instead, growing on the needles was Candida parapsilosis—a fungal strain resistant to every known form of medicine.

This poses a catastrophic threat because intravenous drug use significantly compromises the immune system. It disrupts sleep patterns—including the body’s ability to achieve REM sleep—and weakens the body’s defenses, increasing the risk of serious infections that a healthy person might fight off. For a user with such a compromised system, the fungus can be a death sentence, Boman says bluntly. 

The presence of a drug-resistant pathogen also creates a crisis for first responders who suffer accidental needle sticks. “Doctors don’t want to deal with this; nurses don’t want to deal with this,” he says. “As a firefighter, I don’t want to deal with this when I’m out on the road.”

Faced with a dire scenario, Boman reverted to his natural state: solution-driven pragmatism.

To find a weapon against the super fungus, the researchers turned to the landscape of Ohio itself. Boman and Wildschutte directed undergrads to collect dirt from the edges of farm fields when they went home for winter break. The logic was simple but brilliant: farm soil is teeming with chemicals and fertilizers, creating a harsh environment where bacteria must evolve unique properties to survive.

Back in the lab, the team isolated bacteria in the genus Pseudomonas from the farm dirt. They grew candida pathogens on petri dishes until the plates were covered in a lethal lawn, introduced the pseudomonas bacteria from the soil samples, and waited.

And then, white dots appeared—three different types of bacteria capable of killing the candida fungus.

The irony is not lost on Boman, who possesses a history degree and a love for narrative symmetry: The solution to a plague festering in the needles of a struggling Ohio city was found in the dirt of the state’s farmland.

Yet the reach of this breakthrough extends far beyond the drug epidemic. By offering a blueprint for a universal pharmaceutical, it could be a lifeline for anyone with a compromised immune system, saving a cancer patient just as readily as someone battling addiction.

Translating such findings into policy is central to Boman’s work at SPA’s newly launched Center for Research and Collaborative Partnerships (CRCP). For founding director Julie Baldwin, Boman is the ideal scholar to champion that mission. “John works across disciplines and institutions to find solutions—not just identify problems,” she says. “That ability to seamlessly bridge research and the real world is why I wanted him on the team.”

Baldwin designed CRCP—which has secured over $70 million in grants—around the premise that research doesn’t end in an academic journal. Through policy expertise and public partnerships, the center ensures that the work moves “deliberately toward implementation and public benefit.”

“Find a better policy school, period,” Boman challenges. “In DC, we’re going to get heard.”

As the center pursues federal support to deploy these solutions, the focus remains on impact. “The folks in government are the ones that are actually going to make this meaningful for Americans,” Boman notes. Baldwin agrees: “By bringing researchers and policymakers together, we ensure promising science reaches the systems and communities it is meant to serve.”

While the road from a petri dish to a pharmacy shelf is long, Boman is patient. He compares the scientific process to fighting a fire: You don’t always see the progress immediately, but if you keep working, the results follow.  

For now, Boman continues to straddle two worlds. In one, he is the firefighter, slicing through the metal of a mangled car to save a life within minutes. In the other, he is the researcher, sifting through data and the debris of a public health crisis, looking for microscopic solutions that could save millions in the decades to come.

“There are lots of different ways you can go about helping people,” he says. “Some of them are concrete and immediate. Others take more time before they materialize into something beneficial on a wide scale—but that’s where we’re headed.”

In the soil of Ohio, among the rusted factories and the cornfields, Boman has found proof that even in the darkest ground, something life-saving can grow.

Interested in supporting the work of the Center for Research and Collaborative Partnerships? Contact Julie Baldwin at [email protected].