Originally published at: The self-fulfilling prophecy of drugged Halloween candy | Boing Boing
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I’m sure people are fuckn fighting over the chance to hand these out to kids at $25 a pop
FFS it’s a huge deal when a house springs for a full size candy bar. It’s mindblowing anyome thinks this is common.
Honestly,going door to door to collect foodstuffs from dozens of strangers seems positively unhygenic what with the deadly global pandemic going around.
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See also: people so afraid of razor blades that they take their kid’s candy to the ER to have it X-rayed. This is a real thing parents do now, and no it has never actually happened. It’s an urban legend from 40 years ago.
Even if there had been a couple real incidents, the response is way out of proportion to the danger, and this has real societal costs. Look at all the “tamper evident” packaging food all comes in now. That all goes back to the mysterious Tylenol poisoning that killed 7 people in 1982. Yes it was terrible, but the incident was a freak thing and didn’t warrant everyone forever needing all their food to be wrapped in four layers of security. Prior to that nobody was afraid of the food supply chain and we saved a lot of production costs and landfill waste. Now we’ll all spend the rest of our lives peeling little stickers off the top of our condiments and cutting open plastic rings before we can use them.
In addition to the financial and environmental costs, it’s bad for society (IMHO) for everyone to be so afraid of everything all the time. Teaching people to correctly evaluate risk and match responses to danger levels would make the world a much better place. Police going on the news every Halloween telling parents to x-ray their candy undermines that very badly. It contributes to people accepting security theater in all aspects of their lives. Ultimately, it probably makes people vote conservative as well, because people who are afraid of everything tend to do that.
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The worst thing about the trick or treat edibles story is that its fiction. I would love if my neighbors were handing those out. I would go out of my way to spring for a costume!
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“And what do we say when a stranger offers you drugs? That’s right, you say ‘Thaaaank yoooou!’ remember, drugs are expensive, so be sure to show your appreciation.”
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Seems like the day for posting this recent article:
The characteristics of these BS stories include:
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Low stakes: the supposed terrible consequences levied by the accused (in this case leftists) are in reality either minor or non-existent.
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Irrelevant Examples: examples of the “disturbing trend” provided in the story are tangential at best.
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Misleading statistics: quantitative supporting data in the story, often taken from dubious sources, is misinterpreted.
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False equivalence: the story usually downplays actual examples of the trend perpetrated by those who the accusation benefits even as it acknowledges it in passing).
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Depends on what side of the sale you’re on. Fear sells.
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Yo, anybody don’t want the Halloween drugs, send em my way.
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The only Halloween warnings I remember from my childhood were warnings from the early trick-or-treaters to skip the dentist’s house on the next block because he was only giving out apples and toothbrushes.
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I need a new toothbrush. Good idea.
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police departments and the news outlets
There is the clue what it is all about.
“Remind them why they need us!”
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Kids getting into edibles is a real thing, but it isn’t from getting them for Halloween. It is from parents not locking up their stash and kids getting into it. And a few dogs.
The only poisoned candy on record was a guy who poisoned his own kids for insurance money.
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There was another a few decades before that. In 1959 a dentist, William Shyne, dosed a ton of kids with laxatives, no one was killed, but there were some illnesses and he was convicted for it. So, yeah one death, from a murderous family member, and one real non-fatal case in over a century.
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It wasn’t candy, but I received poison from my own mother and a few neighbors on Halloween as a kid, in the form of Chick Tracts.
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My childhood dentist went the other way. Chewy caramels and good hard candies. He made a lot of money repairing dental work for the candy-stealing parents for the next few weeks.
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There was one house on the block that always gave these away, and my Dad wouldn’t let us skip it (so they wouldn’t feel bad).
We always chucked those things the second we got home.
I really wish I had saved them all now. Particularly the one about D&D players going to hell for something something… DEVIL!
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I’m just going to leave this here:
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The “psychos hiding razor blades in apples” myth was started by children who were eager to de-normalize the practice of people handing out lame-ass treats like apples instead of candy.
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Careful, that shit will destroy your mind.
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As far as I know, there have been a few cases of contaminated Halloween candy, but they were all the result of people in the child’s home tampering with it. It’s part of the American tradition of taking real threats that exist within the home and putting them somewhere outside, because it’s psychologically easier to assume the worst about strangers than good ol’ Uncle Jack…
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