Cut the alarmism, Senator. Bad guys don’t hand out ‘rainbow’ fentanyl as Halloween candy

It wouldn’t be Halloween without a cheap scare or two. That’s what the holiday is for, right?

So every October, like clockwork, stories start spreading about the evil people who might be lurking in your neighborhood, villains seeking to prey on costumed children as they go door to door trick or treating. Maybe they’re handing out gummies laced with THC. Perhaps they’ve slipped a razor blade — or even an infected hypodermic needle — into your tot’s candy bars.

These tales are horrifying. They’re also usually nonsense.

Oh sure, there once was a boy who really did die from poisoned Pixy Stix — this was in 1974, nearly 50 years ago — but the culprit was his own father, who needed money and hoped to get a windfall of insurance cash. Mostly though, the latest rumors are just recycled versions of the same old urban myths that have been around for decades, scary stories intended to frighten the gullible and paranoid.

This brings us to U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall.

The Kansas Republican last week joined a dozen of his colleagues in a pre-holiday “public service announcement” warning that drug traffickers are targeting the nation’s children with rainbow-colored fentanyl designed to look like candy and sidewalk chalk.

“I come to you today not only as a United States senator, but as a fellow American concerned about the health of our nation’s youth this Halloween,” Marshall says in the video version of the announcement, before concluding that cartels are “poisoning our neighbors and children.”

The problem with the announcement? It fudges the line between fact and myth.

Fentanyl is definitely a problem in America. And yes, the drug in its street version often comes in an array of bright and brilliant colors. But as drug policy experts told NPR this week, that has nothing to do with dazzling young children looking for a sugar fix. Instead, those colored pills serve as a bit of branding for drug dealers, one expert said, “to distinguish their product from other products on the street.”

You don’t have to take the liberal media’s word for it, though. Fox News has also debunked “Halloween fentanyl” myths that are circulating this year.

“I’m sure this does happen sometimes, but it is unlikely,” Joseph Palamar, an associate professor at New York University Langone Medical Center, told the news outlet. “Even if fentanyl pills were only a few dollars each, most people would likely find them too expensive to give to kids on Halloween as a sick joke.”

Let’s be fair to Marshall. He and his Senate colleagues didn’t come up with this alarm on their own — the federal Drug Enforcement Agency in August issued a public warning about “brightly-colored” fentanyl it has seized in a number of states, with the additional alarm that it was “made to look like candy to children and young people.” Even then, however, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said that “we have not seen any connection to Halloween.”

What’s more, fentanyl really is a dangerous drug. Overdose deaths skyrocketed during the pandemic, including tens of thousands of fentanyl-related cases. Sometimes, young people are the victims: Marshall is the sponsor of the Cooper Davis Act — named after a Johnson County teen who died last year from an overdose — which would hold social media companies accountable for trafficking and drug sales that occur on their platforms.

That’s arguably useful, and deserves debate. But there is a fine line between informed action and alarmism.

Marshall, along with his colleagues, probably crossed that line with their Halloween PSA and its echoes of all the trick-or-treating hoaxes of decades past. Will any fentanyl deaths be prevented? Probably not. More likely: A few panicked parents might rifle through their children’s candy stash this Oct. 31 in a frantic and fruitless attempt to find deadly drugs.

Fentanyl is a problem, but it shouldn’t be hyped beyond the facts. Maybe this Halloween, Roger Marshall can go as the boogeyman.