DOJ, Senate Leader Continue To Stoke Irrational Fear That Drug Dealers Are Targeting Kids With Multicolored Fentanyl

People who fail to understand the basics of supply and demand continue to insist suppliers want to kill potential customers.

The DEA is leading the charge, engaging in hysterics while pretending to present facts, claiming that recent busts involving multicolored fentanyl indicate drug dealers are targeting children — children prone to ingesting pills that look like medicine or, even more stupidly, colorful fentanyl that resembles (according to DEA officials) “sidewalk chalk.”

Halloween is just around the proverbial corner, which means hysteria is being compounded as government officials insist without factual basis that average adult drug customers (and their dealers) are going to be handing drugs out like literal candy just because these officials imagine the drugs that have been seized resemble something children would consume immediately if found mixed into their Halloween trick or treat hauls.

Here are the seized drugs the DEA insists are meant to addict and/or kill children:

With Halloween approaching and federal law enforcement obliging with the narrative, this story — which should have been dead in the water shortly after its initial release earlier this month — continues to survive. Those helping this narrative thrive should know better.

Reporters at major new services are presenting government claims unchallenged — the sort of carelessness that has repeatedly burned reporters who more closely resemble stenographers than journalists in the past. Local law enforcement agencies are beginning to beat the same drum because why not? Fear leads to better funding and fewer inconvenient questions about law enforcement tactics. And the DEA remains the DEA. The more irrational fear it can supply, the less likely it is that its budget will see any meaningful decreases.

So, we get stupid bullshit like this, delivered by Kate Snow and Safia Samee Ali, alleged journalists for NBC News.

Drug cartels are using brightly colored “rainbow fentanyl” pills to target young people, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration warned Monday, signaling a new threat in the opioid crisis. 

In an interview Monday, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said the drug is being sold in pills and powders that come in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes intended to look like candy. Sometimes traffickers even nickname the products “Sweet Tarts” and “Skittles” after real candy. 

“This is another tactic that they’re using to get more fentanyl to more people,” Milgram said. “The more drugs they can sell, the more addiction they drive, the more profit they make.”

Everything issued by the DEA from its self-serving mouth is repeated verbatim and unchallenged by NBC News. It’s not journalism. It barely qualifies as reporting. Not a single question is raised about the DEA’s assertions, not even when the assertions veer into the realm of comical conspiracy theorizing.

Milgram warned that cartels are also following children on social media to get access to them.

“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.” 

Drug cartels may have plenty of money and power but I seriously doubt they’re tasking lower level members with following teens on social media platforms to expand their market share. This is a seriously stupid assertion and, of course, it’s presented as gospel by the DEA and accepted as gospel by the NBC stenographers.

There’s a correction appended to this so-called news article, but all the correction suggests is the reporters misquoted the DEA spokesperson to inadvertently limit the breadth of the DEA’s assertions.

CORRECTION (Sept. 27, 2022, 7:35 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that drug cartels were using “rainbow fentanyl” pills to target people as young as middle schoolers. Cartels are targeting young people with the multi-colored pills, the DEA administrator said.

Middle schoolers are “young people.” All this correction suggests is that the DEA was uncomfortable with being linked to the perception that targeting of “young people” by drug cartels pushing colorful fentanyl is limited to those above the age of 12.

The DOJ is getting into the action, too. Its statements aren’t quite as hysterical, but it’s still making statements that portray nearly any amount of fentanyl as lethal, something that’s only going to encourage the nocebo affect displayed by far too many state and local police officers.

The Department of Justice seized an estimated 10 million fentanyl-laced pills, the attorney general and DEA administrator announced on Tuesday at DEA headquarters.

“Of this year, DEA agents conducted 389 investigations, including 35 cartel linked investigations in 201 cities,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters. “Over the course of these investigations, we seized over 10 million fake pills and 82 pounds of fentanyl powder motor crews across all 50 states. That is enough to kill 36 million Americans. In addition agencies 338 weapons during this operation, including shotguns pistols, and hand grenades.”

“Enough to kill 36 million Americans.” Sounds bad, man. But why would it? Repeat business is the core of the illicit drug market. Killing off 36 million customers is just bad business. Even though the drug has the potential to kill, it does not mean that dividing the total haul by the average amount needed to result in a fatal OD accurately represents the threat the drugs represent. And it’s interesting the DOJ did not perform the same calculation for the weapons and ammunition seized. If the government seized, say, 10,000 rounds of ammunition during this operation, it should be reported as enough bullets to kill 10,000 Americans. I mean, that’s just math.

This ABC News article — again written without any challenge to the claims made by the DEA and DOJ — contains yet another truly ridiculous statement from DEA administrator Anne Migram:

“There are 100 million other people on Snapchat 150 million more Americans on Instagram 180 million more on Facebook. So [drug cartels] believe that there will always be someone else that they can sell to.”

This appears to be the DEA’s attempt to portray hysterical claims about drugs with potential to kill millions as credible. As was pointed out earlier, it’s bad business to kill customers by the tens, much less the millions. But the DEA insists cartels don’t mind killing millions of Americans because that still leaves millions of other Americans to kill. We, the people, are paying billions to agencies like the DEA in exchange for five decades of consecutive drug war losses justified by galaxy brain horseshit that somehow manages to be republished across the net by “credible” news sources without skepticism or even a handful of tough questions.

Governments are opportunistic. The DEA certainly is. And so are certain elected representatives, who see the zeitgeist and carpe diem it, no matter how ridiculous the underlying premise. Halloween is prime hysteria time and the top man in the US Senate is all over it.

Democratic Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer has warned rainbow fentanyl may be distributed during Halloween to get children “hooked.”

Speaking on Sunday outside his New York office, Schumer said rainbow fentanyl was one of the biggest health issues facing the country right now.

He also said he wants $290 million to help fight the hold the addictive opioid is gaining in America.

If you want $290 million, just ask for it. Don’t insult everyone (but the DEA’s) intelligence by pretending that this is the year drug dealers will finally do the thing parents groups, idiotic public officials, and that one part of your Facebook feed (you know the one) have insisted for years will happen on Halloween: the free distribution of drugs to trick-or-treating children as some sort of guerrilla marketing campaign for drug cartels.

No one likes being talked down to by an idiot, Chuck.

“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.

You can see the news conference here, as reported by an NBC news affiliate (under the headline “TOP STORY”). This is what accompanied this obviously fatuous question by Schumer.

There are several ways to answer this disingenuous question, ranging from “STFU, Chuck” to “one is packaged and sold by multiple retailers on store shelves, and one is packaged and sold by multiple retailers in covert transactions that often involve lightly-coded text messages,” but the question really doesn’t deserve an answer. Cartels are not trying to make fentanyl-laced pills look like candy and they have zero interest in giving the product away for free, not even on a quasi-holiday. If anything, the coloring is brand differentiation that may make drug customers better informed about product strength and dose size, which could conceivably lead to fewer inadvertent overdoses.

But never mind the factual details and non-hysterical rhetoric. Let’s just join Chuck on the DEA’s bus to Dumbass Town. $290 million is a relative drop in the bucket when it comes to drug war spending. And as long as we’re going to keep losing that war, we may as well continue to look incredibly stupid doing it.