Local news stations, police departments, and Home Owners Associations warn parents every year about inspecting their children’s Halloween candy in case its been drugged or laced with poison.
Growing up, my parents meticulously looked over my Halloween loot to make sure it wasn’t tampered with before taking “their share” of Reese’s peanut butter cups.
But contrary to popular belief, police have never documented real cases of people randomly distributing poisoned candy to children on Halloween.
A Myth Propagated Yearly
Urban legends have to start somewhere, and while there’s no evidence of a genuine Halloween poisoning that happens to children on a random basis, there have been isolated incidents initially reported as random poisonings that turned into something else.
Take the Timothy O’Bryan murder, for example.
On October 31, 1974, Timothy O’Bryan died as a result of eating a cyanide-laced Pixie Stix he got while trick-or-treating by the hands of his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan.
To make his son’s death look like a random sadistic act, he also gave poisoned Pixie Stixs to his other four children who did not eat the candy. The prosecution found that collecting on the life insurance policy was O’Bryan’s motive and in May of 1975, he was convicted of murder.
Similar instances of Halloween poisoning have happened in Detriot and New York and mirror the actions of the infamous 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders.
Now, drugs “disguised” as candy derives from drug busts.
In Hapeville, Georgia, police announced a seizure that included cocaine, pills shaped like cartoon characters, and marijuana-infused lolipops. In 2017, a major drug bust in San Antonio uncovered 600 pounds of meth-infused candy that authorities thought might have been targeted to children.
“Even if they were not sold directly to a child, what if these lollipops were dropped anywhere in the neighborhood?” Diaz told the Dallas Morning News. “A child picking them up is going to see them and think it’s regular candy.”
This logic undermines everything the government, and even Hollywood, tells us about drug trafficking. Drugs are expensive to push and even more important to protect by any means possible, all thanks to the black market.
The Drug War Lives On
Since President Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, federal and state governments have spent $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars attempting to solve this problem.
Instead, the drug war has incarcerated more than half a million people, meant less money for education, health, social services, and public safety programs, and essentially provides a monopoly and price supports for organized crime.
For example, when Canada first discussed ending marijuana prohibition, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the move, “would be less about the economic benefits of legalization and more about bringing down organized crime.”
Marijuana sales are big business for organized crime in Canada and it’s going to take time before the country’s regulations reduce the size of the black market.
In the first week of legal sales, shortages were reported and consumers turned to their neighborhood drug dealers – a classic example of price determination in a market.
In open markets, self-regulatory measures keep both drugs, transactions, consumers, and sellers safe.
So this Halloween, remember that no one is drugging your child’s candy and that the war on drugs is driving a lot of this false hysteria in the first place.