Parents, if you grew up in the 1980s, you were taught that nice old ladies who made fresh baked goods were just as trustworthy as the witch from Hansel and Gretel. In your developing little minds, the only people who handed out anything other than hermetically sealed, commercially made candy were psychopaths who hid razors in apples and poison in brownies. To this day, plenty of parents who grew up scared of Halloween candy won’t let their kids eat anything they trick-or-treated until it’s been x-rayed.
Surely there must be hundreds of cases of tampered candy every year to keep this paranoia alive. Right? C’mon, at least a few dozen.
Try around 80.
Not 80 per year. Eighty total reported cases since 1959. Nationwide. Not one of them resulted in a death. The absolute worst case left an adult needing a few stitches.
If you’re really worried about your kid’s Halloween candy, take a good hard look at your family. According to Snopes, the vast majority of alleged Halloween poisonings were actually clumsy attempts to cover up a child’s murder. In 1974, a man poisoned his son by spiking pixie sticks with cyanide so he could collect on a substantial life insurance policy. In 1970, a five-year-old boy died of a heroin overdose after eating his uncle’s drug stash. The family sprinkled more heroin onto the boy’s Halloween candy to protect the uncle.
The country was hit by a string of non-Halloween poisonings in 1982, including the death of 7 people from adulterated Tylenol. (Modern safety seals on all over-the-counter drugs are a direct result of this tragedy.) Halloween was decried as a deadly attack on the nation’s children. Every urban legend about tampered candy was trotted out as an undeniable fact heard from your mother’s neighbor or the kid in the next classroom. Airports, hospitals and police stations opened their x-ray machines to trick-or-treaters while malls started offering the world’s lamest candy in exchange for the alleged safety of trick-or-treating indoors.
Zero lives were saved.
Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Denver who studies Halloween, hasn’t been able to find a single substantiated report of a child being killed or seriously injured from candy they were given while trick-or-treating.
In fact, Connie Opheikens, Community Relations Director of Samaritan Hospital in Moses Lake, Washington said her hospital hasn’t found a single contaminated piece of candy in 20 years. To her, the real benefit of x-raying candy is to make kids comfortable with the idea of being in a hospital. "If they have to come to the hospital and maybe they're going to have an x-ray, they might be worried ...We show them that the candy comes out just perfectly fine and if you have to have your arm x-rayed, your arm's going to be perfectly fine, too."
If you’re truly worried about someone trying to kill your kid this Halloween, keep them away from family members. Oh, and also keep them away from traffic. The candy they get from strangers is fine, but due to the sheer volume of people on the streets, pedestrians are four times more likely to be hit by a car on Halloween than any other night of the year.
As long as you stick to the sidewalks and keep an eye on traffic, you and your kids can safely gorge on their Halloween candy until they develop an uncontrollable twitch. It’s not from drugs, it’s just from all the sugar. They'll be fine in the morning. Honest.
