The War on Halloween
The national security state hates unregulated fun
Halloween is a pretty extraordinary holiday. Think about it. Every year, millions of Americans knock on the doors of total strangers and accept candy from them, almost entirely without incident. For a culture as isolated and mistrustful as ours is, it’s amazing this is even possible.
Halloween is a repudiation of the “See Something, Say Something” paranoia fostered by the national security state since 9/11 in particular. Small surprise, then, that these government agencies fearmonger about the holiday, never passing up a chance to ruin the fun.
The scaremongering is most acute in the anti-drug campaign — particularly with regard to fentanyl. “Illicit drug producers may target children with candy-colored pills,” the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has warned. The DEA has issued similar warnings, alerting the public in a press release of “the alarming emerging trend of colorful fentanyl available across the United States.” The so-called “rainbow fentanyl,” the DEA warns, is part of “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults.”
It’s a pretty scary prospect. There’s just one problem: none of it is true.
“The number of reports of fentanyl laced candy was zero,” University of Delaware Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice Dr. Joel Best told me. “It made no sense at all. Why exactly are you going to poison small children? That is going to bring down huge law enforcement on you and does nothing to enhance your drug trade.”
Best has spent decades tracking the unfounded panic over poisoned Halloween candy. According to his analysis, there are literally zero reports in the medical literature saying children have ever been poisoned by candy they received while trick-or-treating.
To the extent that Halloween poses any risk at all, Best says, the holiday does coincide with a significantly higher number of vehicular accidents involving children.
If safety were really the concern, that’s what the government would be focused on: mitigating our car-choked cities with better planning. But year after year, government agencies issue the same debunked warnings about things like drugged candy. What happened to its war on “disinformation”?
The war against Halloween is subtle. What the national security state hates is people doing anything that is not regulated, from using social media in naughty ways (e.g., publishing a hacked JD Vance vetting document) to going trick or treating without the appropriate vigilance about wrongdoers lurking around every corner.
Asked why law enforcement falls for the fentanyl hoax each year, Professor Best said it’s not malice so much as thoughtlessness.
“I would guess that there isn’t anyone in law enforcement that gives a moment’s thought to this,” Best said. “There’s organizations like the National Safety Council and they will send out pre-packaged lists of Halloween safety tips that tell people to monitor the candy. I think they mail these to police … I don’t think anyone thinks twice about it.”
I think Best is right. In the years I’ve spent covering national security, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is how often it is that thoughtless on the part of government officials and agencies is the culprit. The anti-Tik Tok forces. The counter-disinformation industry. The AI obsession. I’m sure they all think that they are doing God’s work. But core to their war on whatever is always about righting some wrong where the result often seems to be more control.
Far more often than not in my investigations, I don’t find a Watergate or a consciously evil villain twirling his mustache. I find many poor decisions, even quite harmful ones, but they typically originate from out-of-touch bureaucrats who don’t think about or fail to consider the consequences of whatever they are attempting to do. People imagine national security officialdom having some kind of special knowledge but oftentimes I find they’re relying on the same overblown popular media as everyone else.
On Wednesday, for example, the DEA tweeted its first-ever warning about “pink cocaine.”
The substance, it turns out, was all over the news after it was found in the body of deceased One Direction star Liam Payne. The DEA fine print concludes that “pink cocaine is not a commonly trafficked substance.” In fact, in four years, the Agency says, while it has seized 180 million fentanyl pills, it has only seized 960 pink powders.
Yet still we must be afraid, always afraid.
The poisoned candy scare has been going on at least since I was a kid in the 80s. Honestly just take 2 seconds to check that the wrapper hasn't been tampered with, which is a good idea with any packaged food you're about to eat.
One year an elderly man in my neighborhood was passing out KKK pamphlets along with full size candy bars. Nobody ever warned us about that.
I spent 23 years in TV broadcasting and the news thrived on scaring the viewers. What scares me is walking or bicycling down a residential street at night (sidewalks empty because people are afraid to simply go out and walk at night) and seeing a big flat screen illuminating every living room. My wife and I are the only people we know of that don't have a flat screen because to us it is a noisy, intrusive presence, an electronic salesman and a money sink (cable subscription) that isn't welcome in our home.