| Tatto Flashback (New York) |
Question:
>It's back, the old LSD tattoo hoax. An ominous flier being faxed
across state lines warns parents of temporary tattoos laced with LSD
that children absorb unwittingly through the skin. The tattoos are of
a blue star or appealing cartoon characters, like Superman and Bart
Simpson (well, not that appealing). Someone, supposedly, wants to
harm children, or get them as customers.
The official-sounding source: "J. O'Donnell, Danbury Hospital,
Outpatient Chemical Dependency Treatment Service." Except that there
is no J. O'Donnell. Or, if there is, Danbury Hospital has never heard
of him or her, or seen a blue star tattoo or any of the others
described. The hospital has, however, been fielding calls from as far
away as Germany asking about the warning. "It's turned into a chain
letter, almost," says a spokesman.
Answer:
- I can verify the "chain-letter" nature of this rumor. In 1990-1991 I was
Marketing Director for a psychiatric hospital in Sacramento (a miserable
job BTW, but what it took to convince me that the semiconductor industry
is relatively normal) with 3 marketing reps under me. I came in one day
to find the lady who marketed to schools/ councilors/ probation merrily
making about a hundred or so copies of this type of flier to give to all
her accounts. She had been given it by someone at Kaiser and in true
marketing fashion had redone it with our logo for distribution. I forced
her to check out the source and we soon discovered (I think by talking
to local police) that it was a false issue that periodically resurfaced.
My own experience plus the Danbury Hospital story above make me think
that this situation is being aggravated by the very aggressive marketing
that these kinds of hospitals do.
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