In the two months leading up to Halloween, 1,542 news stories warned that drug dealers were planning on slipping “rainbow fentanyl” into kids trick-or-treat candy. Certain media circles drove their viewers into a panic about the perceived threat.
Now that Halloween has passed, unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been a single report of this actually happening anywhere in the U.S.
While it’s not uncommon for parents to voice concern over what their child may encounter while trick-or-treating, misinformation has been particularly widespread this year. So where did this rumor originate?
Back in August, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sent out an alert that warned parents about the existence of bright-colored fentanyl pills that look very similar to candy — known as “rainbow fentanyl.” The DEA warned that the pills were a “deliberate scheme by drug cartels” to sell addictive fentanyl to children and young people.
While the DEA didn’t mention Halloween, many people were concerned about the warning leading up to the holiday weekend and ran with a narrative that dealers would be giving the drugs away for free to trick-or-treaters. But drug experts shared that there was no new fentanyl threat to kids this Halloween. In fact, one researcher told NPR that there’s no evidence any child has ever been killed or seriously hurt by a treat found during trick-or-treating.
Sheila Vakharia, the deputy director of the department of research and academic engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance, says the misinformation about rainbow fentanyl diminishes the realities of the drug crisis. Vakharia explained to NPR that the drug overdose crisis has claimed over 1 million lives in in the last two decades alone, and that number doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
“When we talk about fentanyl, and we see it in the headlines and we see that people are dying of overdoses involving this drug, we should think: How do we keep people alive?” she said. ”And how do we keep the people most at risk of exposure alive?”
