Hollywood’s Elixir Of Youth: Fact Or Fiction?

Despite the more fantastical claims one encounters about adrenochrome, the fact is that it’s just a normal chemical compound found in the body. It’s produced when the hormone adrenaline — also known as epinephrine — oxidizes. Oxidation is when “a substance comes into contact with oxygen or another oxidizing substance,” as the National Cancer Institute has explained.

Scientists have known about adrenaline since 1901; it wasn't long after that that the hormone began to be used for medical purposes. Nowadays it’s synthesized in labs and used to treat a variety of conditions. If you know what an EpiPen is, you’ll be aware of this.

Adrenochrome, though, isn’t used to treat people for any conditions within the United States. As Dr. Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist, physician, and assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, pointed out in a conversation with How Stuff Works, there’s no reason to think it would work in the way adrenaline does.

Without much in the way of evidence indicating that adrenochrome can help to treat medical conditions, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hasn’t ever approved it for use. Comparing it to adrenaline, Dr. Marino said, “Obviously, epinephrine would be the preferred and recommended agent between the two.”

During the 1950s, two psychiatrists from Canada started studying adrenaline, which they’d come to believe may have been linked to schizophrenia. The pair, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, suspected that too much adrenaline in a person’s system might trigger the disorder.

Dr. Hoffer took it upon himself to begin experimenting with adrenochrome. After he did so, though, he made a big claim: he’d begun to suffer from hallucinations and delusions. In other words, he’d started to experience symptoms associated with schizophrenia.

As interesting as the work that Osmond and Dr. Hoffer were undertaking was, it has since been widely debunked. Other experts who have looked into their research on the links between adrenochrome and schizophrenia simply aren’t convinced that their claims were accurate.

The issue with Osmond and Dr. Hoffer’s adrenochrome hypothesis is that it took root within popular culture before it was properly debunked. The mid-20th century, after all, was a time in which multiple writers were thinking deeply about the potential of psychedelics.

In Huxley’s famous 1954 autobiographical work The Doors of Perception, adrenochrome gets a mention. In the book — throughout which the author describes his own mescaline-induced psychedelic experiences — adrenochrome is spoken of as a clue “being systematically followed.”

Huxley was far from the only prominent writer of the period to become fascinated by adrenochrome. Anthony Burgess mentioned it in his classic A Clockwork Orange, referring to it, in the jargon of the novel’s time and place, as “drencrom.” Dune writer Frank Herbert also referenced it in his novel Destination: Void.

Thompson’s idea of adrenochrome really seems to have embedded itself into our culture. Indeed, it appears to be at the heart of the contemporary conspiracy theories surrounding it. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson writes, “There’s only one source for this stuff... the adrenaline glands from a living human body. It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”

But even though the very men who depicted adrenochrome in this over-the-top way admitted to exaggerating its effects, it’s this fantastical idea that has endured through the decades. Adrenochrome has been repeatedly shown to be an innocuous chemical compound, but some people refuse to accept that.

The idea that a cabal of elites are harvesting adrenochrome from young people has existed for a long time, but the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a huge upsurge in concern about it. Stats from Google Trends indicate that March and June 2020 saw big spikes in information searches about the chemical compound.

Content about adrenochrome began to appear on mainstream social-media sites, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. And the communities behind the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracies became obsessed by it.

For anyone who doesn’t know, QAnon is a far-right, decentralized movement based around the conspiracy theory that our world is dominated by the so-called “Deep State.” This Deep State, as viewed by QAnon’s proponents, is made up of Satan-worshippers and pedophiles. The only person who can overcome this sinister cabal, apparently, is Donald Trump.

According to the QAnon believers, a day of reckoning — which they refer to as “The Storm” — will one day come and judgment will be meted out to the members of the Deep State. They’ll be placed under arrest and shipped out to Guantanamo Bay, where they’ll face trial and, ultimately, be executed.

Not everyone who believes in the claims of QAnon is a violent extremist, but all the same violence has been inspired by the movement. It has shaped the way many people view democracy throughout the United States, while many have come to believe elections can’t be trusted.

Pizzagate is what happens when a conspiracy theory gets really out of hand. In Washington, DC there’s a pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong, and, in early December 2016, a 28-year-old guy walked through its front door. He was armed with an assault rifle.

The armed guy had come to believe all this because Comet Ping Pong’s owner, James Alefantis, was referenced in the leaked emails of John Podesta, who’d been the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Alefantis was actually just a donor to the Democratic Party.

It was on 4Chan that the Pizzagate conspiracy really began to spread. Users began to track down Alefantis’ social media pages, where they gathered “evidence” to support their claims about what was going on at his restaurant. They used things like photographs of kids as a spurious way to back up their beliefs.

The claims of the Pizzagate conspiracy soon found their way onto more mainstream social-media platforms, including Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The subject gained a huge amount of traction, and before long it had made its way beyond the border of the United States.

Alefantis and his colleagues at the pizza place were soon being viciously targeted by believers of the conspiracy. Their lives were threatened on social media, with hundreds of violent hate messages being sent to them. Things only got worse, and eventually the situation escalated beyond social media: physical protests began to take place outside the restaurant.

The frenzied opposition to Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong finally culminated when that guy walked into the building with his assault rifle in hand. He reportedly aimed it at a worker, and he even fired the weapon at one stage. Luckily the worker wasn’t hurt, and nor was anyone else, for that matter.

Both the QAnon and Pizzagate communities — which overlap in many instances — have been drawn in by the adrenochrome-harvesting conspiracy theory. Such people were particularly vulnerable to its claims at the start of the pandemic, when things in society were so uncertain. But what specifically can account for the conspiracy’s spread during that period?

Given that most users don’t see the content in these parts of the internet, social-media companies have trouble picking up on it. If a spurious conspiracy theory is being discussed in such a space, it will have the opportunity to take root before any moderators have a chance to stop it

While social media has added a new dimension to the nature of conspiracy theories in the 21st century, some of their tropes remain the same as ever. For one thing, at the heart of the adrenochrome harvesting theory lies the very same antisemitism that has thrived throughout the previous centuries.

Antisemitism is at the heart of Pizzagate and QAnon, too. For example, a video entitled “Jew Ritual BLOOD LIBEL Sacrifice is #ADRENOCHROME Harvesting” was once shared on an antisemitic board on 4Chan, attempting to link adrenochrome with Jewish people. This same video started doing the rounds again at the height of the Pizzagate scandal.

Like Alefantis, Abramovich was also mentioned in Podesta’s leaked emails. According to The New York Times, Abramovich had once emailed Podesta, inviting him to attend a “Spirit Cooking” dinner at Abramovich’s home. “Spirit Cooking” is a term she employed for one of her artworks, which involved the painting of recipes onto a wall in pig’s blood

Things only got crazier from there, as QAnon adopted the adrenochrome conspiracy theory. Throughout 2017 and 2018 more and more claims about adrenochrome began to emerge online, and they became increasingly bizarre.

In February 2019 the far-right fake news website InfoWars produced a feature on adrenochrome, in which it linked the conspiracy to the activities of the Clinton Foundation. It also linked adrenochrome-harvesting to the company Ambrosia, which really did focus on “young blood” transfusion.

The adrenochrome conspiracy theory had been growing for years by the start of 2020. But it was about to go into overdrive with the onset of the pandemic. One of the reasons for that was that celebrities began to post images of their own faces, while they were in their homes like everyone else.

The theories only spread wider and grew stranger as the pandemic continued. Lady Gaga found herself in the firing line at one stage, with claims spreading that she was a participant in blood rituals so she could obtain her own fix of adrenochrome.

This situation represented Parris and Donovan’s concept of “hidden virality” in action. The disinformation about adrenochrome was circulating in online spaces that were initially very limited. The mainstream remained largely unaware of it, which meant it could spread uncontested.

Adrenochrome was especially suited to being caught up by the hidden virality phenomenon. After all, in spite of the claims of conspiracy theorists, it’s a fairly benign chemical compound without many uses. Before the conspiracy theory took root, there wasn’t much cause for academics or journalists to ever write about it. And that created a “data void.”

Given the relative lack of factual information about what the chemical compound actually is back in 2020 on the internet, search engines were simply directing people who searched for the term “adrenochrome” towards whatever info happened to be online at the time. And it wasn’t necessarily trustworthy.

Proponents of the conspiracy, meanwhile, would encourage other people to search for specific phrases on Google, which would, inevitably, lead them to read fake reports. Of course, a good conspiracy theory muddies the water by incorporating real facts into it, and that’s what happened here. Fact and fiction got merged.

The adrenochrome conspiracy theory was also encouraged by real-life social issues. The pandemic was an incredibly anxious time, in which nobody could be entirely sure of what was going on. The mistrust that created allowed for conspiratorial thinking to thrive.

Early intervention is key to prevent conspiracy theories like the adrenochrome-harvesting fiction from spreading widely. As Wired argues, “Early detection requires knowledge of where conspiracy theories originate online and reliable measurements of how they scale, and it needs to be followed by active promotion of authoritative content that can inoculate against the disinformation.”

But all of this is easier said than done, of course: data voids can be extremely difficult to overcome. After all, even had it been widely available, would watertight, peer-reviewed research dismissing the claims of the adrenochrome conspiracy theory really have put people off believing it?

The adrenochrome conspiracy theory has been repeatedly debunked by scientists. As Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, put it in an article published by Forbes, “Adrenochrome, which has no rejuvenating effects, and very questionable psychedelic properties, would have long faded into obscurity had it not been rejuvenated by the QAnon twaddle.”