As an investigative journalist, I thought for the week of Halloween I would investigate a very common Halloween hoax that comes up year after year. Is Halloween candy collected from trick-or-treating safe to eat?
According to the Halloween poisoning page on snopes.com , the rumors of poisoned candy being distributed to children on Halloween is false. The tale originates as far back as 1989. Parents checked the contents of their kid’s collected candy for open wrappers that might be poisoned candy or contain razor blades. Did it every contain such things? Snopes says no.
Stories of children bringing home marijuana disguised as Snickers bars occurred as recently as 2000. This event occurred in Hercules California. Turns out a mailman bought the bag of Snickers, thinking that it was truly a bag of candy when it really was not.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/12914/brief-history-sick-people-tampering-halloween-candy
Another popular story of Halloween candy poisoning is the death of a young boy named Timothy O’Bryan, who died from eating a cyanide laced Pixie Stix. Timothy’s father, Ronald O’Bryan, killed his son to collect a life insurance policy. He was convicted of murdering his son. This event was a purposeful attempt to kill a child, not a random event that parents worried about.
Of course, when it all comes down to it, many parents simply look through their children’s bags of trick-or-treat candy to make sure there are not any suspicious pieces or ones with open wrappers. Personally, my mom always did this with me and enforced a rule that I could only eat three pieces of candy that night. Of course, the one year I stuck to that rule was when I had the flu.
Or maybe, parents just look through their kids’ candy to steal the best pieces. I leave you with this video as a thought:
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