I’m listening to Conspiracy Theories again, and this series of episodes is about the Tylenol murders of 1982. There’s a segment where they’re talking about how a wave of copycats led to massive concerns about the safety of Halloween candy, and it reminded me of something I don’t want to be lost to the dust of history, so I’m sharing it here.
Beginning a week after 9/11, several letters filled with anthrax were mailed to various US government figures and major newspaper editors, and this continued into October. We still don’t know why; when the probable perpetrator realized the FBI was getting its case in order, he killed himself. Personally, having seen some of the letters, I think it was a false flag op—they include phrases like “Allah is great,” “this is next,” and “death to America,” all of which seem to be trying to make it look like al-Qaeda was behind the letters. The probable perpetrator, however, was a devout Catholic who hated Muslims, and could easily have heard all of these phrases in the news coverage on 9/11 (I personally remember “death to America” being part of the first “we think we may have a lead on where this came from” I heard).
In any case. Just as in 1982 there was a terrible fear that Tylenol murder copycats would harm kids with tainted candy because of a spike in food tampering that happened at the time, in 2001 there was a fear of one candy in particular:
Although the anthrax powder used in the attacks was very noticeably not food, there was a fear kids might tear open their candy and dump it straight into their mouths with no idea there was more than just flavored sugar in there. This was one of the last years I trick-or-treated, and I can tell you exactly how many Pixy Stix I got that year:
Both were actually knockoffs that come in plastic tubes that require scissors to open, special heat-sealing equipment to close, and couldn’t have a syringe inserted in them without noticeable tampering, and both came from the same house. Pixy Stix had been a staple of trick-or-treat for my entire childhood, and they just…vanished. In a single month they disappeared. They’ve bounced back, kind of, but as far as I can tell they’re still not as popular as they used to be, and I actually haven’t seen one of the Giant Stix since then. I don’t know if they were discontinued or if they’re just not carried in most stores anymore, and if they were discontinued I don’t know if it was that year or somewhat later, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the anthrax attacks were a death knell for them.
So often when we discuss the 9/11 attacks, we make it sound like it was one-and-done: the east coast had one really bad morning and then we knew it was Bin Laden and we could get on with life. And in hindsight, yeah, it was one really bad morning followed by an absolutely Augean cleanup. But at the time, for six weeks we all thought it wasn’t just one really bad morning. And if you’re not familiar with anthrax: imagine one morning you get to work and open a letter, and you are informed by the contents of that letter that the powder you just inhaled when it opened contains a concentrated, stabilized form of Covid that will not die when rendered into powder form, and when you call the CDC they go “…..oh, fuck.” (This comparison would work slightly better if Covid was a bacteria like anthrax instead of a virus, but work with me here.)
That’s what we were up against: an unknown entity who might be the same group that had slaughtered at-the-time-over-2000-people*, and this entity had access to a laboratory strain of a rare disease that kills up to 80% of people who contract it, depending on the type of infection, and we had no idea where they might hit next. Oh, and that comparison I made to Covid? That was deliberate. Because it wasn’t just about the severity of it, or the uncertainty involved; it’s that the deadliest way to contract it is through inhalation and symptoms can take up to two months to show. Which meant people in those mailrooms who were close enough to inhale invisible quantities of the powder could be carrying a deadly disease and not know until they’d infected dozens of others. Y’all have seen the Covid chaos, imagine it with a disease that can kill up to 80% of its victims. And the least-lethal form is spread by skin contact and still kills about 20% of untreated victims! So like—better hope none of your letters touched any of the anthrax letters, because if spores were chilling on your mail and you opened it with bare hands…
That hung over us for several months, dragging out the fear and trauma of the initial attack. It was such a deep fear it actually changed the way Americans used the internet. Before the anthrax attacks, there were still a decent amount of people who considered the internet faddish. I knew a few people who wouldn’t buy from brick and mortar shops with web addresses because they considered the web address a sign that the business latched onto trends and was untrustworthy. When the anthrax attacks happened, though, and USPS had to seize literally hundreds of thousands of packages and letters to be sure they weren’t contaminated…well, you can’t send anthrax through email, can you. Our culture was permanently changed by the anthrax attacks, and nobody ever talks about them. Meanwhile, as someone who was there seven thousand years ago, I don’t think you can truly have an honest discussion about the country’s collective 9/11 trauma and mass hysteria without including them.
There was a time we all thought the world was ending, and it extended from a pair of towers in the sky to tiny tower-shaped children’s sweets.
I just want you all to know.
*there was no death toll yet. They were still digging out bodies and parts of the Towers were still on fire.
