Adrenochrome is a real substance, created in the body when adrenaline is oxidized. In the 1960s, researchers speculated that it could be somehow linked to the appearance of schizophrenia. But adrenochrome’s place in QAnon lore appears to truly derive from its unearned position in counterculture fiction as the ultimate psychedelic, a stand-in for a mythical illicit substance described in books like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
