With Halloween right around the corner, 'tis the season for pumpkin spiced everything, pop-up costume stores, candy apples stuffed with razor blades, and now ecstasy disguised as candy being distributed to trick-or-treaters. Right now, a warning about the threat of MDMA-spiked Halloween candy is trending, but it's more than likely another urban legend.
As Thump reports, if you've been on Facebook at all recently, "you most likely saw the following headline nestled among all the celebrity nudity scandals and dancing Drake GIFs: 'Ecstasy: Mississippi Police Warn Drug May Resemble Halloween Candy." The police force in Jackson, Mississippi shared the warning this week via their Facebook and it has since gone viral (and has even garnered coverage on various news outlets), but the image and accompanying warning has been floating around the internet since at least September.
If your kids get these for halloween, it's not candy
Posted by Thomas Chizzo Bagwell on Friday, September 25, 2015
Of course, Snopes ran a fact-check against the claim that parents should actually be concerned about ecstasy being clandestinely passed off as Halloween candy and concluded that while the drug is sometimes pressed in brightly-colored candy-esque shapes, everything else is absolutely the stuff of urban legends. Snopes asserts: "while the image of Ecstasy circulating on Facebook might at first appear to represent a true threat to kids on Halloween, there's little reason to suspect Molly will be lurking in any plastic pumpkins this year." The site aslo states that "an important distinction to bear in mind is that the MDMA depicted is not a new form designed to appeal to children: MDMA tablets have historically been produced with a variety of shapes and colors befitting its status as a 'party drug.'" Furthermore, recreational drugs tend to be expensive so passing them out to random children would not be a money-wise decision for the neighborhood drug dealer.
In other words: it is seriously unlikely that there are many (if any at all) rich villain-types wasting thousands of dollars on candy dishes full of pills to give away to children for free. Even if one such weirdo who dreams of dosing their entire neighborhood exists, chances are they wouldn't have a reliable connection to get their hands on such huge quantities of the designer drug in its cutely-pressed tablet form, and if they did, they certainly wouldn't be giving it away for free. Besides, we're not talking about some new sugar-infused version of the drug: kids would spit those bitter-tasting pills out right away. As Death & Taxes asks, "What would their goal even be? To get kids to come to their all-ages raves? Not to mention, if you're trying to poison children, there are plenty of subtler tasting, more efficient options. Have these people even seen Breaking Bad?"
While the viral nature of the warning is unprecedented (thanks, internet!), this trending story isn't the first urban legend to scare parents in the days leading up to the one day all year not only accepting candy from strangers, but demanding it while in costume is socially permissible. The legends of the past included poison-laden candy and razor blade apples. The Misfits' song "Halloween" is a classic ode to these Urban Legends of the past; listen to it below.
