“Is ‘rainbow fentanyl’ a threat to your kids this Halloween? Experts say no.” — NPR
Hi there. I’m the person putting drugs in Halloween candy. I’m also the person who sticks razor blades in movie theater cushions to give people venereal diseases, and the person who squeezes crumpled paper into car door handles to show secret symbols to sex traffickers.
Do I have any proof that I’ve done any of these things and that these supposed allegations are anything more than scaremongering to get clicks and views? No, of course not. But you don’t really want proof, do you?
Look, it’s pretty simple. Every year around Halloween time, I, an actual human being, of sound mind and body, go out and buy a bunch of candy. And then I buy a bunch of drugs. And then, after spending all that time and money on the drugs and the candy that I will never consume myself, I choose voluntarily, of my own free will, to spend hours and hours of my one wild and precious life carefully opening candy wrappers and injecting each and every fun-size Snickers with marijuana.
How does this work, you might ask? How does one “inject marijuana”? Would anyone in their right mind actually go through the trouble to do this? To which I say: Yes. Yes, it does make sense. Let’s move on.
What do I get out of this painstaking endeavor that costs a lot of time and money and that, again, produces literally nothing for me? Well, let me turn that back around and ask you. What do you get out of that Netflix true crime drama you’ve been binging? What do you get out of half-learning French every other year? What do you get out of Pickleball? Listen. It beats doomscrolling social media, doesn’t it? Call it self-care.
I’ll be honest. I’ve been doing this for years, and putting the drugs into the Halloween candy is not as exciting as it once was. But at this point, it’s tradition. And this is America. The Supreme Court has shown us that, if we can prove anyone in America ever did any single thing one way in history, we better keep doing that thing exactly that way forever.
If I stop putting drugs in the Halloween candy, where will the media get its next moral panic from? Our dysfunctional political system? The oncoming destruction of the entire planet due to climate collapse? Olivia Wilde’s salad dressing? Please.
For all the energy spent warning concerned parents about my actions—which, again, there is no proof of and which there will very likely never be any proof of—we could have dedicated much more newspaper space and radio and television time to warning people about actual things that matter. Like the fact that there’s still a pandemic going on, or that we are the only nation where children are taught to bring bulletproof backpacks to school. Or that ten-year-old rape victims in Texas now have to give birth to their rapists’ babies.
You see now? All of that was a bummer and not at all fun for the news. So please just let me do my important and not-at-all-made-up work. As an added bonus, I’m thinking about putting the COVID vaccine in Halloween candy too. The media would really eat that up, right?