part0014

LSD may be more a part of the 1960s than the 1980s, having largely died out as a drug of choice. However, a long-discredited rumor about the drug reappeared in a big way during late 1986. I got dozens of reports—from four states in one week alone in early 1987—about a kind of LSD called “Blue Star acid.” The story just wasn’t true, but the flashbacks continued.

Here are the contents of a flier that one reader sent me: “A WARNING TO ALL PARENTS. According to police, a form of tattoo—BLUE STAR—is readily available to young children. It is a small sheet of white paper containing blue stars the size of a pencil eraser. Each STAR is impregnated with LSD and can be removed from the paper to be placed in the mouth. Absorption can occur through the skin by simply handling the paper tattoo!”

The spurious information, and even the capitalized words, vary only slightly among many photocopies of this warning circulated around the country. Sometimes a specific source, such as the San Diego police or a Kansas “drug squad,” is mentioned. Most warnings also include references to small colored paper “tabs” in circulation, likewise impregnated with acid and bearing the likeness of Mickey Mouse, Superman, or other cartoon characters.

It is tricky to disprove the “Blue Star acid” rumors definitively, since some forms of what narcotics agents call “blotter acid” or “paper acid”—paper impregnated with LSD did, in fact, circulate during the 1960s and 1970s. Some were imprinted with cartoon characters, and police sometimes refer to them as “Snoopies.” Occasionally, even today, blotter acid shows up in drug-enforcement efforts.

A 1980 New Jersey State Police Narcotic Bureau bulletin did warn, “Children may be susceptible to this type of cartoon stamp believing it a tattoo transfer ” (my emphasis). But there is no evidence that any actual cartoon “tattoos” containing LSD have circulated among children.

In the November 24, 1986, issue of Newsweek , reporters investigated rumors in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Georgia, Kansas, and Nebraska before concluding only that some “microdots” of LSD resembling the Blue Stars “may have existed” about fifteen years earlier.

One of the fliers warning of the current “threat” circulated in the schools of Great Neck, New York, during early February 1987. The Nassau County Department of Drug and Alcohol Addiction checked into it and issued a statement saying that there was “no validity to this letter at this time.”

On February 9, the Columbia (South Carolina) Record published a carefully researched article on virtually the same scare letter, which was making the rounds in schools and day-care centers. Law-enforcement authorities pronounced the flier to be bogus. A local agent of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration said, “We haven’t heard of LSD being circulated this way in years.”

On February 11, the Tacoma (Washington) News Tribune , impelled by “hundreds of frightened parents” who had called the Washington State Highway Patrol headquarters, assured readers that Blue Star LSD-impregnated tattoos or decals were not, as rumor claimed, being sold in any area schools. The newspaper quoted a police spokesman: “We could not substantiate one case anywhere in the country.”

The following week, I heard reports of the flier circulating in a number of cities in Illinois and Indiana. The Richmond (Indiana) Palladium-Item even quoted from a past study that I had made of a version of the legend, which was common in 1981 to 1982.

Back then, I called it “Mickey Mouse acid” because this character was most often named in the warnings. But even at that time, the term “Blue Star” had begun appearing in many fliers. Lately, the Blue Stars are getting first mention, and the cartoon characters come into subsequent paragraphs. In addition, the warnings are becoming more elaborate.

In August 1986, the Baltimore Evening Sun had reported hundreds of warning notices being distributed by teachers, pediatricians, and even in a Baltimore police-precinct bulletin. One version of the story described a brain damaged child dying in a Baltimore hospital after handling the Blue Stars.

In an attempt to trace the rumor, the Sun followed up references on the fliers to San Diego, to an Elks lodge in Idaho, and to several organizations throughout Maryland. The newspaper found not a shred of evidence that Blue Star acid ever existed. Needless to say, the story about the brain-damaged child turned out to be false.

Another major study of the rumor was reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer in December 1986. “Blue Star tattoo,” the article conceded, “was something everybody has heard about [and] no one has actually seen.”

It’s possible that some genuine police bulletins were misread by citizens and that the rumors, already in circulation, took off from there. In the Tacoma case, it appears that a police query—apparently itself a response to the rumor—was worded “Have you seen any drug-laced tattoos?” This was then mistakenly repeated as “We have seen many drug-laced tattoos!” That’s one way these stories build up steam.

Shortly after I wrote my original column, as above, in late February 1987, virtually the same “Blue Star” warnings dated in early March came to me from Richmond, Virginia; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Seattle, Washington. About a year and a half after my original column, the story was still going strong and, in response to a mid-western reader’s question, I devoted a second column to the subject, which follows below.

A reader who follows “Urban Legends” in the Milwaukee Journal wrote to me a while back to ask, “Do you think your column may have started a rumor about ‘Blue Star Acid’? Or was my experience just one of those things? ”

No, I do not think my column spawned a Milwaukee-area rumor about the supposed deadly drug called “Blue Star Acid,” since the “Blue Star” story proliferated both before and after I debunked it here a year and one-half ago .

The fliers, most of them titled ” A Warning to Parents, “purported to be factual bulletins about a local rash of LSD addiction. They claimed that the drug was given to children on the surface of paper tattoos or transfers imprinted with blue stars and other designs .

The warnings urged parents to watch for “Blue Star Acid” in the hands of their kids, claiming that addiction and even death could result from children licking, or even just touching, the stars as they removed them from the paper. (LSD, incidentally, is not considered to be an addictive drug.)

Wherever the “Blue Star” rumor has begun to circulate, local police have disclaimed any knowledge of the fliers’ source, and denied that LSD in this form was a problem in their community. And there are no records of any child licking a tab of “Blue Star, ” thinking it was a lick-and-stick tattoo .

Why was I suspected of starting the local rumor? Well, my Wisconsin reader had never heard the story until reading about it in my column. Then, some weeks later, the reader said, a woman working in the same factory came up with “something very important” to be inserted into the plant newsletter .

Could I have unwittingly spawned the story in Wisconsin? It’s not likely, considering that I quoted only a small part of an entire flier in the first column. Besides, the “Blue Star” story has done very well on its own, despite my debunking attempt .

Since the column appeared, I have received twenty-seven pieces of mail from several states and Canada documenting further “Blue Star Acid” scares. The letters contained either new versions of the same old flier or copies of local newspaper stories, quoting law-enforcement authorities, that debunk the rumors .

I’ve been sent fliers issued by day-care centers, schools, lodges, and churches. Many of them are reproduced almost verbatim from earlier warnings, sometimes superimposed on a new group’s letterhead .

Most of the texts make heavy use of capital letters, underlining, and exclamation points, and they tend to include vague references like “The Valley Childrens Hospital” or “according to Police Authorities. ” The fliers often begin, “We have been informed, ” without stating who has informed whom. Many fliers use the phrase —in reference to drug pushers —that they hope to “cultivate new customers. ”

Channels of distribution include school and company newsletters, office bulletin boards, and even computer networks. Titles on typical fliers are “Blue Star Alert!” “Fatal Tattoo, ”and “Attention Parents! ”

Unfortunately, several newspapers have printed such fliers without comment, assuming they were an official warning of some kind. These papers include the August 26, 1987, issue of the Griffin (Georgia) Daily News, the November 19, 1987, issue of the Governors Island Gazette, and the June 1988 issue of Oregon Education.

Newspapers that assigned reporters to investigate “Blue Star Acid” rumors all over the country, however, found no verification, and headlined their stories accordingly: “No Cause for Alarm” ( Washington Post, June2, 1988); “Only a Folk Tale” ( Dubuque Telegraph-Herald, October 6, 1987); “Tattoo Tripped Up ”(Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 1987 ).

But folklorists, journalists, and police authorities all saying there is no epidemic of “Blue Star Acid” among children, does not convince everyone. In the same period I have received three letters from people asserting that the story must be true because blotter acid actually exists .

Two of these letters came from prisoners, who may have a prejudiced view of police information; the third letter merely claimed without evidence that “drug-laced tattoos ARE NOT an urban legend . ”

OK, prove it, then. Blotter acid (which I KNOW exists!) is not a “tattoo ”; and tattoos or transfers are what these fliers claim is running rampant in dozens of communities. The designs on blotter acid cannot be peeled off; merely handling these sheets is highly unlikely to pose serious health hazards. There would be very little profit potential in giving free LSD to youngsters .

It’s one thing to oppose (as I assure you, I do) sales of illicit drugs and the personal and social problems such drugs cause. But it’s quite another matter to base your opposition on scare tactics and fantasy, which is what these ubiquitous “Blue Star Acid” fliers represent .

The most authoritative proof of the folkloric nature of the “Blue Star Acid” fliers that I have found came not from a folklorist, but from a drug expert. Recently I spoke to William Hopkins, director of the Bureau of Research for the State of New York Division of Substance Abuse Services, who described a statewide survey that his unit conducted in February and March 1988 in which the unit looked for problems with the stuff. A questionnaire was sent to 405 New York law-enforcement agencies after thousands of anonymous letters were circulated throughout the state suggesting that “Blue Star Acid” was “an impending disaster.” The survey asked the agencies to report their cases involving LSD—particularly acid in the “Blue Star” form—during the period 1985 through 1987.

What “next to nothing” translates into in terms of statistics—for example, in 1987—was that out of the 405 law-enforcement agencies surveyed, 342 (84.4 percent) had no cases involving LSD of any type, and only 3 departments (1.0 percent) had more than twenty LSD cases. In the very few instances where LSD cases were reported, less than half involved a blue star or cartoon imprinted on absorbent paper. The figures for 1985 and 1986 were comparable.

The cautiously worded conclusion that Hopkins’s office drew from the results of the survey was that these results “tend to support our initial impression that the anonymous letters warning about Blue Star LSD was a hoax and should be treated as such.” In the cover letter transmitting the survey results, the advice furnished to the state’s drug agencies was to “discourage the reprinting and circulation” of the fliers because “the rumored spread of LSD is generally unfounded.”

A particular concern of drug-abuse officers, Hopkins told me, is that fliers of this kind could actually create a problem where none exists. Drug users may learn about “Blue Star Acid” from the fliers themselves and then begin to ask for it from their suppliers. Where there’s demand, a supply can be created. Ironically, then, the “Blue Star Acid” fliers have the potential of bringing about the very situation that they purport to be fighting. So come on, folks. Please, stop duplicating and distributing these spurious notices. *

Although law-enforcement officials, journalists, and folklorists continue to debunk the Blue Star acid rumor, as this book goes to press the fliers continue to proliferate and the rumor still spreads. In autumn 1988, I received copies of the by-now-familiar drug alert from readers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Wisconsin, Indiana, Delaware, Ohio, and Kentucky. In the New York-New Jersey area, the fliers became so widespread that the New York Times ran a story on December 9, 1988, debunking the rumor. (See also my letter responding to their story, published on December 24.)

In November and December, I received a flurry of calls from Alaska about the story, the first one coming from a woman in Fairbanks who was disturbed by a “Safety and Health Alert” notice that her first-grader brought home from school. Some Alaskan authorities assumed that Blue Star acid was a genuine problem in the lower Forty-eight, but merely a rumor (so far) in Alaska. Not so.

At around the same time, an employee of the U. S. Agency for International Development in Lima, Peru, saw virtually the same notice, written in Spanish, posted in the U.S. embassy and USAID offices. The Lima newspaper La República later picked up the warning and published an article cautioning parents against “estrella azul”—Blue Star acid.

Neither woman gave any credence to these apparently official warnings, though. Both had read about the Blue Star acid rumor in my 1984 book The Choking Doberman , and they knew that it was untrue.

Early in the new year, I received a call from David Mannweiler, columnist for the Indianapolis News: Blue Star acid rumors were still rife in that city, with fliers coming home from school with the kiddies. As Mannweiler quoted Captain Michael Sherman, head of the Indianapolis Police Department narcotics division, in his column on January 10: “We have not had that first seizure of this kind of transfer patches for LSD. I haven’t received any concrete evidence that this has happened. We haven’t found any of those transfers.”