The fattest and fastest-growing file in my urban legend collection is marked "Blue Star Acid." Several times weekly I receive fliers telling of LSD-laced tattoos, transfers or stickers - printed with attractive designs - that are supposedly being sold or given to children.
Although I have explained the inaccuracies and falsehoods of these notices in two of my books - "The Choking Doberman" (1984) and "Curses! Broiled Again!" (1989) - a steady stream of the fliers continues to flow in from photocopy machines across the nation.Each notice, no matter where it originates, contains nearly the same wording. Almost all warn of a supposedly "new way of selling acid," and they go on to mention various kinds of the drug, such as Mickey Mouse, Blue Star, Red Pyramid, Microdot or Window Pane.
I've even received fliers recently from Germany ("einer neuen Drogenform") and Spain ("la neuva forma de vender al acido").
Designs on the sheets are said to look like a "tatoo," frequently misspelled this way, or to be blue stars "the size of pencil erasers" which can be peeled off and chewed.
Some fliers warn parents that sheets are "laced with strychnine," though it isn't clear why drug dealers would want to kill off potential customers.
Readers are urged to "get the word out" by reproducing the fliers for distribution within their community, and people have certainly followed that advice!
In the past few months I've seen the same flier reproduced in church bulletins, lodge newsletters, company safety directives, hospital notices, on computerized bulletin boards and in countless letters sent to parents from schools and day-care centers.
The heart of each message is the same notice that I've been collecting for more than a decade - complete with misspellings, heavy capitalization and strings of superfluous exclamation points.
Although many of these warnings mention "drug squads" or other authorities, the notices never originate from law-enforcement organizations.
When a Blue Star Acid scare starts in a community, local police are usually quick to explain that although drug-laced paper sheets do exist, authorities are not having a problem with them now.
Besides, the fliers do not accurately describe typical sheets of "blotter acid," nor are the claimed methods of distribution, use of the sheets or the drug's symptoms correctly described.
My file also contains dozens of newspaper articles debunking local outbreaks of Blue Star Acid rumors.
In November, for example, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune headlined an article "LSD warning letters raising false alarms from Miss. to La." The article traced fliers coming from a karate convention through a chiropractic clinic and health center to numerous area schools.
In January the Houston Chronicle quoted a police chemist who said that the LSD warnings proliferating in that area were "vague and misleading." He had actually seen blotter acid only once, and that was "a long time ago."
The closest I've found to a reliable report of blotter-acid injury was in the Oct. 5 issue of the Kenosha (Wis.) News where a police detective was quoted as saying, "Within the last month, two girls, about 16, were treated at a local hospital for an apparent LSD reaction. . . . They had ingested squares, but whether the substance on the stickers was LSD could not be verified."
That's pretty vague, and it hardly suggests a major crime wave.
In February the Washington Post quoted a Fairfax County, Va., officer who said, "It's a phantom, it's a ghost. . . . You can't kill it. I wish we could find all the copies of it so we could burn them!"
An April article in the Baltimore Sun began with a good comparison:
"Like Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing knife-wielding villain in the numerous `Friday the 13th' movies, the legend of the infamous Blue Star Tattoo lives."
It seems that this story will probably go on haunting us for as long as well-meaning people have easy access to copy machines.
I'd better get a good supply of file folders.