Someone Decides To Say Something Less Stupid About Rainbow Fentanyl… And It’s A Cop
from the hooray-for-common-sense dept
There’s a drug panic underway and the DEA is to blame. Ever since the appearance of multi-colored fentanyl pills on the scene, the DEA has somehow managed to surpass its normal ridiculous hyperbole in public statements, making all sorts of absurd claims about this new threat to the youth of America. Couple this hysteria with the normal, incredibly stupid claims miscreants will hand out (expensive) drugs for free to trick-or-treating kids and you’ve got a perfect storm of insane and inane “reporting” that just regurgitates whatever idiocy has fallen out of law enforcement officials’ mouths.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said it has observed an “alarming” trend of brightly-colored fentanyl made to look like candy that is being used to attract children and young people.
That’s the DEA’s official statement after seizing multi-colored pills (that look like multi-colored pills, rather than multi-colored candy) and less-processed fentanyl that bears a slight resemblance to sidewalk chalk.
The suggestion that most children would ingest sidewalk chalk is absurd. The assertion that drug dealers are hoping to break into the less-than-lucrative lunch money market is equally asinine.
That’s not the end of the ridiculousness, though.
“Rainbow fentanyl — fentanyl pills and powder that come in a variety of bright colors, shapes, and sizes — is a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a statement.
Extremely unlikely. The most rational explanation is there’s an attempt to differentiate product lines, building brand loyalty among adult users. Most fentanyl pills look alike, sporting an unappetizing pale blue color. The arrival of new colors on the scene isn’t an attempt to lure children and their limited tolerance/funds. It’s just a little creativity being displayed by sellers in a market that rarely lacks for buyers.
Unfortunately (and predictably), this stupidity has spread to elected politicians. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held a press conference in which he held up a photo of “rainbow fentanyl” while standing next to some dude wearing scrubs and parroted the DEA’s bullshit:
“This is fentanyl, this is a Sweetart: you tell me the difference,” Schumer said while holding up pictures of the addictive pills and the tangy sweet, according to a New York Post report.
“Halloween is coming … this is really worrisome and really dangerous,” he added.
Rhetorical questions don’t need answers but rhetoric like this certainly deserves pushback. Anyone can tell the difference, even most of the kids Schumer seems to believe will spend this Halloween overdosing on fentanyl. First, the colors aren’t to attract kids. Second, this Halloween will end like all the rest: with no one handing out free illegal drugs to trick-or-treaters.
This new “report” contained even more stupidity from DEA Administrator Anne Milgram:
“Our kids are on smartphones, and that means that the cartels are following them,” she said. “The cartels are on smartphones, and what we know without question is that most young people are aware that there are people dealing drugs on social media, not everyone, but particularly when you start to talk to high school kids, they have an awareness.”
Cartels are on smartphones. So are kids. There’s not much overlap in the Venn diagram Milgram speciously tries to conjure here. Cartels have plenty of other stuff to take care of. Cruising social media services for kids is a pretty terrible way to expand markets and increase profits. I mean, they’re not like pharmaceutical companies which can buy ads on platforms to familiarize youth with available drugs and possibly create lifelong markets for addictive products.
With all this hysteria and idiocy, it’s refreshing and completely worth pointing out when someone pokes holes in all this bullshit… especially when that person is a cop. Hidden among KEPR’s reprint of a law enforcement press release about a recent fentanyl bust is this dry, succinct gem of statement from an Kennewick, Washington police officer:
“I don’t think that people will be giving out fentanyl pills as candy, that doesn’t make sense from an addicts perspective that they treasure something so valuable,” said Officer Roman Trujilo, KPD. “However, with all of the candy out there, there are potential users that might have purchased these pills and if they have them around and their kids come across them, that could be absolutely deadly. “
That’s the actual danger: that a kid might happen across a stray pill and think it’s candy. The weeks of hysteria generated by the DEA, politicians, and newscasters willing to align themselves with this stupidity have managed to obscure the real danger, burying it under absurd statements about dangers that don’t actually exist.
Unfortunately, logical statements from law enforcement officials are the exception, rather than the rule, when it comes to anti-drug agitation. If more officers were willing to stick to reality when discussing drugs, the DEA might finally be encouraged to back away from its insane statements and misrepresentations of the threats posed by drug consumption. But it’s 2022 and I think it’s safe to say that day will never come.
Filed Under: dea, fentanyl, moral panic, nonsense, overhype, rainbow fentanyl
Comments on “Someone Decides To Say Something Less Stupid About Rainbow Fentanyl… And It’s A Cop”
no, drug dealers are definitely trying to make new customers out of children by giving them valuable substances in a package that hides what the substance is so that anyone who gets addicted to it has no idea how to get more. genius A+ marketing strategy
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Yeah you really don’t have to scratch the surface of the narrative very hard to expose some glaring problems with it, which makes the number of people repeating it and falling for it all the more embarrassing.
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Like most right-wing conspiracies, this does indeed fall apart on the basic application of logic and facts. If you give out drugs at random, you don’t create new customers since you don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who you are. On top of that, with fentanyl specifically, cops are apparently so afraid of the stuff that they fall over if they think it’s nearby, but a small child will come back for more?
I mean, it probably has more logic to it than the regular satanic/black magic complaints (which ignore that Halloween is literally named after the fact that it’s a cleansing ritual in preparation for the Christian date of All Saints’ Day), but not be much.
Re: Re: It's not the fentanyl... it's the rainbows.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole “Rainbow Fentanyl” panic subconsciously resonates — for the people who fall for these things — with the ridiculous moral panic a few years ago, over the notorious “Rainbow (lipstick) Parties” that allegedly vast numbers of teenagers were participating in.
And of course that’s quite aside from the connection between rainbows and social movements to combat racial and gender prejudice…
Isn’t that going to be approximately the same danger regardless of if it’s halloween or not? I mean I supose this time of children might have candy on their mind more (and be slightly more prone to thinking they see sandy)… but it seems unlikely that would make a huge diff.
And if you have someone with that around children all the time, you’d think they’d either take measures to make sure they keep their stash to themselves, or the child would already be likely to have OD’d.
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Yes, but admitting that wouldn’t give cops a chance to look busy and important by talking about tainted Halloween candy or whatever.
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“Isn’t that going to be approximately the same danger regardless of if it’s halloween or not? ”
Indeed it it. Halloween has the extra weirdness of being the time of year when you go to strangers to ask them to give you random things, but nobody taking drugs is going to hand them over to kids they don’t know. IIRC, the only truly confirmed example of Halloween poisoning was a guy who wanted to poison his own kid and used the holiday as a way to try and get away with it. I doubt he’d have gone “well, it’s November 1st, I can’t try and kill him now”.
Sane Cop
The cop who said the reasonable thing is right, but he’s still a bastard.
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Not necessarily, he could be one of the near-mythical good cops that just hasn’t been driven out yet.
'Who cares about accomplishing stuff, Look at us Doing Something!'
Imagine if they put that much effort and energy into addressing and solving problems that actually exist outside of their fevered imaginations…
That’s the actual danger: that a kid might happen across a stray pill and think it’s candy.
That’s also the danger of leaving a loaded gun laying around. Some kid might think its a toy and play with it. Unfortunately, there are enough people around that will leave this crap lying around and you end up with the inevitable consequences.
I got all this stuff for Halloween, but I didn’t have any trick-or-treaters this year. This is all too much for me, maybe I can donate it to some charity?
What surprises me the most, is that this “gem of a statement” came from Kennewick WA.
I pointed that out on this site when this story first broke.
Nice post by the way. I loved the article very much. It was so informative and interesting