by J.L. Shioshita —
Picture this: you’re a wide-eyed child once more, and it’s that spooky time of year when you and your brethren can dress up like cartoon princesses, colorful superheroes, and classic monsters of Hollywood yore. That one day of the year you’re allowed to gorge yourself on candy like a heroin addict, and no adult will bat an eye, though there will be bats, tons of them, and orange jack-o-lanterns smiling gap-toothed glowing grins like relapsed sugar fiends.
That’s right, it’s Halloween.
You finished trick-or-treating and are ready to tear into your candy like a serial killer, turn your living room into a chocolate murder scene. You empty your Boo Bucket onto the living room floor and begin sorting your saccharine score, deciding what you want to eat first. You can smell the sugar, that sweet aroma of empty calories. Your molars already ache. A horror movie plays in the background. Something’s coming to get Barbara. You don’t care. You’re coming to get this candy and put it all in your mouth.
You sort your haul into different piles so you can decide what to eat first, chocolate in one, hard candy in another. Those disgusting orange, yellow, and white kernels of tasteless nothing get thrown in the garbage where they belong. You pray there’s no apple or lame toothbrush. That’s blasphemy, like socks on your birthday. Then you find the temporary tattoo.
It’s a bright blue star on a tiny, square paper. You’re excited. You’ve played with temporary tattoos before, but they were the kind you rubbed on your skin with a pencil. This one is a lick-and-stick. You’ve never had one of these before. You gently stick it on your tongue, then press it firmly to the skin of your forearm. You feel cool when you lift your hand and gaze at the finished ink. You feel like an adult. You wish you had some candy cigarettes to puff on. Then, just as quickly, your short attention span kicks in, and you forget all about the tattoo because it’s sugar time.
You pour a tiny bag of Skittles into your left hand, but the small, round candies immediately melt and drip through your fingers like a rainbow waterfall. You stare at the polychromatic cascade, dumbstruck. The rainbow pools on the carpet, growing from a pond to a lake to an ocean. You scramble backward so you don’t fall in, but you can’t feel your hands when you place them on the floor. You just collapse onto the ground like a toddler.
You raise both hands to your face to see what’s wrong with them and are alarmed to discover they’re filling up with air like two puffed-up latex gloves, now three times their standard size. They aren’t your hands anymore. They aren’t anybody’s hands. That’s what your Boo Bucket tells you as it starts to laugh a maniacal cackle that reverberates through your skull.
Terrified, you spin around to where your parents should be sitting on the couch watching their scary movie, but they aren’t there anymore. The TV screen is a black-and-white hole, spinning like a hypnotist’s prop. Two hideous monsters are staring at it with wide, bulging eyes. You scream, and the monsters hear you. They turn their grotesque heads in unison. One rises off the couch. Its face is distorted flesh and looks like someone took an electric hand mixer to its center at high velocity. The eyeballs are two overfilled water balloons pulsating rhythmically. You jump up and run into the kitchen to escape.
One of the monsters follows you. Blue smoke pours from its mouth as it makes gross smacking motions with its spiraling lips. It reaches out to you. You grab a knife from the kitchen table, the one you used to carve a jack-o-lantern with your mom earlier that day. The creature looms closer. You leap and stab it in the chest. The two of you fall to the ground as you continue to thrust the knife into the monster’s squirming torso of snakes and worms. Your scream swirls through the air like a twisting tornado before evaporating into the ceiling, and you just keep stabbing and stabbing and stabbing.
*
Drugs are scary, even the legal ones. Those mile-long lists of side effects can include heart palpitations, sweaty palms, constipation, headaches, blurred vision, and sometimes even death. The smiling couples playing frisbee in the park do not make the pill any easier to swallow. So, it makes sense that urban legends, conspiracy theories, and rumors gather around controlled substances like flies to a corpse. Putting chemicals in our bodies that fundamentally alter our insides and modify our consciousness is terrifying (as I’m writing this on my fifth cup of coffee and have only been awake an hour, but that doesn’t count), and since terrifying is what we’re all about, let’s take a trip into the wild world of LSD and the Blue Star Tattoo urban legend.
This particular story gained popularity in the 1980s when the war on drugs was at its peak and trick-or-treating was becoming real big business. It always starts the same, with a poorly photocopied flyer from the government or some vaguely referenced health organization distributed around an elementary school warning teachers and parents alike of an immediate threat to their children. And though the kids are targeted in the actual legend, the adults become the intended victims as they inevitably fall for it.
The flyer claims there are potent hits of acid disguised as temporary tattoos being distributed to kids. When an unsuspecting child licks the tattoo to apply it to their skin, they’ll ingest the LSD and become drug-addicted losers for the rest of their lives. It’s most popular around Halloween, when children are already engaging in treat extortion from strangers, making it the ideal time to slip some bad acid in with all those mini-Mars bars.
The legend works on a few different levels, reinforcing each other and making the story seem plausible. It preys on the ignorance most parents historically have had when it comes to drug use while also leveraging the ingrained parental drive to protect one’s children from harm. It incorporates Halloween as a time of year already associated with mischief and spooky tidings but with the added layer of socially acceptable interactions between children and strangers. The legend could even be interpreted as a variation of the many ”poisoned candy” myths (razorblades, anyone?).
But is there any actual truth to it?
Since its creation in a lab, LSD has fueled a variety of cautionary urban legends. It never was able to shake the stigma it received in the 1960s as part of the counter-culture movement, and likely due to this association, the government was keen on spreading as much misinformation as it could about the dangers of LSD use (MKUltra be damned).
Ever hear of the babysitter so high on LSD she put the baby in the oven and the turkey in the crib? Or the one about the poor soul who stared at the sun while tripping on acid and went blind? None of these stories are true, but they were passed around as such. Fear is a potent deterrent (or stimulant for us who love horror), and these stories served as a valuable tactic to control the narrative around the drug.
The reality is LSD is not shown to be addictive, and children aren’t going to become drug addicts if they unknowingly ingest some, though they obviously should NOT be doing so. And though acid is frequently distributed on blotter paper decorated with colorful images (like, say, a blue star), there have been no documented cases of it having ever been disguised as a temporary tattoo and given to children on Halloween or any other day of the year. It’s a terrifying story, especially for parents, and a warning to watch your kids and be a mindful parent, but you can’t control everything, and that’s where it really gets under your skin…or on your skin, as the case may be.
HWA Colorado 