Why is QAnon Obsessed with Adrenochrome?

Here’s the scoop behind the scariest sounding chemical to hit conspiracy airwaves

Is adrenochrome a scary green chemical? Nope. This is more likely to be Gatorade. Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

There are a lot of conspiracies going around these days. Some of them are horribly reasonable and totally possible (Republicans in California are putting out fake ballot drop-off boxes so that they can claim that there’s voter fraud), and others are… more outlandish.

One of the loose collections of theories that’s getting more attention recently is QAnon, which is a bunch of conspiracy theories centered around anonymous posts on a 4chan board, which is a message board usually used for mockery, video game discussion, and meme making. It’s pretty wild and has a lot of loose ends, but here’s the gist:

Our government is being controlled by a “deep state” of pedophiles, mainly Democrats. Donald Trump ran for president in order to take down this shadow government, which includes practically every celebrity.

The details, few of them that exist, are shared through coded posts by an anonymous person named “Q”, who posts, as mentioned above, on a backwoods internet message board.

One interesting tidbit of this theory that I’m discussing today is the chemical called “adrenochrome.” This chemical, the QAnon followers claim, is a psychedelic drug that is harvested from the brains of children after scaring…