Adrenochrome is Not an Immortality Serum Harvested From Children

Misbar’s investigation of this claim finds absolutely no credible evidence to suggest Adrenochrome has ever been used, or could be used, as an immortality serum. Nor is there any known instance of it being harvested from a child or involved in a satanic ritual. While Adrenochrome does exist, and is the chemical compound formed from the oxidation of Adrenaline in the human body, it has never been linked to anti-aging or significant psychoactive properties.

Adrenochrome has been of scientific interest since at least the 1950s when it was first analyzed by Abram Hoffer, Humphrey Osmond, and John Smythies in a paper submitted to the British Journal of Psychiatry entitled “Schizophrenia: A New Approach. II. Result of a Year's Research.” In it they concluded after several years of research that Adrenochrome may play a large part in Schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, in addition to having potential application as a very mild psychoactive. 

However, while he and Osmond would maintain that the Adrenochrome hypothesis--i.e. the heightened presence of Adrenochrome in the body made individuals more likely to develop Schizophrenia--in a 1990 paper entitled “The Adrenochrome Hypothesis and Psychiatry”, the substance never went beyond those discussions and failed to reach any meaningful treatment possibilities for schizophrenia. 

The psychoactive effects have also long been exaggerated. Most famously, Adrenochrome was featured in the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and novel of the same name by Hunter S. Thompson. In it the main character, a fictionalized version of Thompson played by Johnny Depp, peers at a brown bottle of an unknown substance given to him by his lawyer and partner in debauchery, Dr. Gonzo played by Benicio Del Toro. He says to him, “that stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer,” that he’ll “go crazy if he takes too much,” and that “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.”

While this scene spawned the earliest appearances of the Adrenochrome conspiracies online, according to an investigation by WIRED, Thompson would later renounce the scene as completely invented and the effects of the drug totally made-up. Despite this, the rumor also received support from authors like Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, heightening the mystery and intrigue behind this substance. Yet, even these psychoactive properties have been largely debunked with most modern day users (and Hoffer himself) reporting suffering anxiety, paranoia, depressive episodes, and headaches after ingesting the substance. 

Today, you can easily find Adrenochrome available on the market for only one useful purpose: aiding in the forming of blood clots for certain surgical patients as described in a paper published by the National Library of Medicine in 2005. However, there are still no known immortality or hallucinogenic applications to the substance and no known cases of it being harvested from any living or dead person as it is easily synthesized in a laboratory. Even though it is widely available, it has also never been found at any notable satanic ritual or linked to any noteworthy celebrity or politician.