Candy's name not so dandy
I'm a crackhead.
(Insert your own joke here.)
Before the DEA comes a'knockin', let me say I'm not a for-real, sell-your-mama's-big-screen-TV-for-$10 crackhead.
I am, though, writing this column under the influence of a drug that has my heart pounding, the keys on my computer keypad jumping around and me feeling a need to keep pushing my eyeballs back into the sockets.
Even more disturbingly, Whoopi Goldberg is looking unprecedentedly delectable on the TV screen.
"Crackheads" is actually the name of a candy, but after eating half a box -- I swear, I flushed the other half so I wouldn't eat it, too -- you realize this isn't Now & Laters or Pez.
Even the founder of the Milwaukee company admitted that. John Osmanski said: "The target market is 18- to 35-year-olds, young professionals and college kids who drink a lot of coffee."
Paul Scott thinks Osmanski is high off his own product if he believes that.
Scott, a hip-hop minister, said, "I try to keep up with what's being fed to our children." He has led national protests against products such as Pimp Juice and Phat Boy malt liquors and is now urging parents to write FYE, the music store that carries the candy, and the candy company itself.
"Parents need to tell them 'Crack is wack' and so is their candy," he said. He has the address on his Web site, nowarningshotsfired.com.
Osmanksi insisted that "there's nothing in the marketing" to associate Crackheads the candy with the crackhead who, I'm guessing, is going to break into your house the minute you run to the Piggly Wiggly for some neck bones.
His argument would be more convincing if the slogan weren't: "We're all addicted to something."
"We're walking the line" of corporate responsibility, he conceded, "but we're on the right side of that line. There is integrity in the product. ... We don't have high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated oil."
C'mon, O. Who thinks that anyone buying a product called Crackheads is going to be overly concerned about hydrogenated oil?
It also boasts 200 milligrams of caffeine per box. You'd have to drink six cups of coffee or 11 Mountain Dews to get that much.
I admit Crackheads tastes good -- I was popping those bad boys like jellybeans until I realized my hands were shaking like those of a vegetarian trapped in the pot roast line at Golden Corral -- but the dude has an uphill battle dissociating his candy from the ravaged souls it mocks.
Osmanski disagreed. "It's a long leap between ingesting caffeine and illicit drugs," he said. "The boxes have a warning label that it's not for kids."
Warning labels? On candy? Pez never had no stinkin' warning labels. For the record, neither did my box of Crackheads -- unless you count the warning that the candy might contain nuts.
Crackheads, Osmanski said, "is a comedic term. ... I've heard Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle joke about it."
A huge difference is that Murphy, Rock and Chappelle live securely in gated communities. If he sells enough Crackheads, Osmanski probably will, too.
Of course, many crackheads end up in gated communities, as well. They're called prisons.
A candy called Crackheads is not, as some critics contend, a sign that the apocalypse is upon us or that we need laws against provocatively named products.
It is a sign, though, that corporate America's self-censoring mechanism, and ours, is out of whack.
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