In the two months leading up to Halloween, there were over 1,500 news stories warning parents about drug dealers sneaking deadly “rainbow fentanyl” into trick-or-treating candy. The reality, thankfully, was that the media-induced fears were overblown — not one single story confirmed this happened anywhere in the U.S. this Halloween.

Halloween-related panics are nothing new — as a kid, this Generation-X reporter had to turn over my trick-or-treating stash to my parents for inspection each year because of overhyped urban legends about razor blades hidden in apples and other candy-covered terrors — but the specific concern about rainbow fentanyl ramped up after an Aug. 30 press release from the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The press release included the photo above and quoted DEA Administrator Anne Milgram calling rainbow fentanyl “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults.”

Republican politicians seized on the issue, with several GOP senators recording a public service announcement somberly declaring “the powerful drug cartels are coming after your kids.” The story was covered in featured stories on ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS Mornings, and received heavy rotation on Fox News.

Outnumbered host Kennedy was the rare dissenter from the theatrical warnings issued by many of her Fox colleagues. In the Oct. 7 episode, she highlighted the (what should be basic) logic that drug dealers make money by selling drugs, not by giving them away anonymously for free.

“I don’t necessarily think these are targeting children because they’re actually too expensive,” said Kennedy. “No one’s going to hand out fentanyl pills on Halloween by the dozens because they are so expensive, they’re for partygoers. They’re for people who are buying oxy on the street. And, you know, it’s like a lot of these are painted to look like prescription pills.”

As Dr. Jorge Caballero pointed out in a Twitter thread, the prescription drugs like oxycodone (either the brand name OxyContin or the generic version) that fentanyl is counterfeited to mimic come in multiple colors, and the “rainbow fentanyl” pills in the photograph featured on the DEA website bore identical markings — an M in a square and the number 30 over a line — as the authentic medicine.

In other words, the illegal pills were fashioned to look like the legal prescription drugs, just as Kennedy and countless other observers have suggested.

Even the fentanyl pills that have been seized by law enforcement inside candy packages or otherwise fashioned to look like Nerds or Skittles seem more likely to be a strategy to help the drug dealers smuggle them into the country rather than give them away for free to children, due in no small part to the high street value of the drugs.

According to AddictionResource.net, the street value of generic oxycodone is around $12 to $40 per pill, and around $50 to $80 per pill of the brand name OxyContin, due to its brand name and longer effective duration.

It is patently absurd to suggest that a drug dealer would give such valuable pills away, knowing the drugs would either kill any child who consumed them or would be highly unlikely to create new customers out of the survivors. If we’re trying to prove the theory that this is a scheme by the drug cartels to get your kids addicted, distributing them in trick-or-treating candy means that anyone who later took them would find it difficult if not impossible to remember which house out of the dozens they visited gave out those trippy candies.

Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi reported on Oct. 26 that “nearly 1,400 print and broadcast stories” warning parents about rainbow fentanyl had followed the Aug. 30 DEA press release, and noted how rare children being poisoned by fentanyl really was:

It’s not clear how many children have been harmed by rainbow fentanyl. A database maintained by America’s Poison Centers that is composed of reporting from the nation’s 55 poison-control centers has recorded 70 cases so far this year in which someone under 18 unintentionally ingested nonprescription fentanyl — 60 of which involved children 2 or younger. But the database doesn’t record fentanyl poisonings by specific type, so it’s not known how many came from rainbow fentanyl alone.

A search of news reports since the drug was first mentioned in mid-August turns up only one suspected accidental case of rainbow fentanyl ingestion, this one involving a 2-year-old.

Farhi also cited several drug researchers who pointed out rainbow fentanyl’s bright coloring was more likely to be a “disguise for smuggling purposes” than a “lure for children,” framing the media coverage as just the latest “moral panic” rather than a real looming danger.

One expert Farhi interviewed, University of Delaware professor Joel Best, told WaPo he had been unable to confirm any report of a child being killed or seriously injured by contaminated trick-or-treat candy, with his research going back to the mid-1980s.

Best also predicted the media furor would die down after Halloween had passed, telling Farhi, “I suspect we won’t hear much about this on Nov. 1.”

The professor was right. Farhi tweeted Tuesday evening with an updated count of 1,542 media stories warning about “rainbow fentanyl” and a comment that “[t]here hasn’t been a single story today confirming this happened anywhere in the U.S.”

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The post ZERO! That’s How Many Kids Reportedly Got ‘Rainbow Fentanyl’ in Trick-or-Treat Candy After Media Fear Mongering first appeared on Mediaite.

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