The sensationalized panic over rainbow fentanyl Halloween sweet

Of the numerous city legends related to Halloween, none could also be as persistent — or as terrifying to adults — as somebody killing kids by way of sweet. The guiding logic appears to be that there’s nothing on this world that kids love greater than sweets and nothing murderers love greater than homicide. So, yr after yr, tales pop up about Halloween sweet crammed with razor blades, cyanide, pins, and even medication.

The 2022 model of this phenomenon is “rainbow” fentanyl. Fentanyl is a drug meant to deal with extreme ache, however when abused, its efficiency may cause demise. In August, the DEA described this whimsical-sounding, multicolored model of the artificial opioid as “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults.” States like Florida and West Virginia have already issued warnings to oldsters in regards to the hazard that colourful fentanyl (typically in candies like Skittles) poses to kids. Senate Republicans have even put out a PSA warning in regards to the hazard. There are additionally a number of media shops relentlessly following the story.

The factor about city legends, although, is that they’re based mostly on our fears, not on fact.

As my former colleague German Lopez identified in 2018, tales about adults killing kids by laced sweet return to the Fifties, however there’s by no means been any proof or information suggesting that it is a actual drawback. Lopez wrote:

The closest factor to a case like those so many mother and father fear about comes from 1974. Back then, an 8-year-old died after consuming Pixy Stix laced with cyanide. But the perpetrator wasn’t a stranger handing out sweet to trick-or-treaters; it was the kid’s father, who apparently did it to get life insurance coverage cash.

Joel Best, the nation’s main professional on Halloween sweet, informed Vox on the time that the concept of a trick-or-treater being killed or critically injured by sweet was “unlikely” and that fears have been overblown.

In 2018, Best chalked these fears as much as our relative security and the need to carry onto it, saying: “We live in a world of apocalyptic scenarios. Here we are; we have safer, healthier, longer lives than people in any other point in history. And we are constantly imagining that this could all fall apart in a nanosecond. … I think that what happens is we translate a lot of our anxiety into fears about our children.”

Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/LightRocket by way of Getty Images

In 2022, issues really feel maybe much more precarious than in 2018. Granted, the United States is within the midst of an opioid dependancy epidemic, and the rise of fentanyl being added to different medication, together with cocaine, has brought about a rash of overdoses. Over the previous couple of years, nevertheless, there was a growth in misinformation about fentanyl specifically, consultants say, primarily in lots of deceptive tales and headlines about police and fentanyl pores and skin publicity. It would possibly make sense, then, that these fears about Halloween sweet are being expressed loudly and by extra outstanding figures, like politicians and sure media personalities. That doesn’t make them extra actual.

There are additionally logical fallacies at work. The concept of drug sellers focusing on kids with lethal doses of rainbow fentanyl doesn’t make an entire lot of sense. First of all, kids don’t have cash, and cash is a crucial side of a drug deal. And secondly, drug sellers want to preserve their consumer base alive since that’s their supply of earnings. Killing individuals, kids included, is unhealthy for enterprise.

“It’s illogical,” Ryan Marino, a toxicologist and dependancy specialist at Case Western Reserve University medical college, informed the Washington Post. “For all intents and purposes, the rainbow fentanyl story is nothing more than a moral panic.”

There are issues to fret about this Halloween, like how pedestrian fatalities are a lot larger on the vacation, however rainbow fentanyl for teenagers most likely isn’t one in every of them.