VS:

CHESAPEAKE, Va — Creating a colourful pile of wrappers, the medical centre technician upends a basket of Skittles, Hershey bars, Twizzlers and other candy onto the bed of an x-ray machine.

Suzanne Mailler is demonstrating a procedure that will be repeated scores of times on Monday evening at the Chesapeake, Virginia medical clinic Patient First.

Across America, paranoid or justifiably cautious parents will bring in their children’s trick-or-treat goodies for screening. Their fear is that the candy given to their children by strangers will be laced with glass, metal or other foreign objects.

This person who poisons candy does not exist. Do not scan your children’s candy. Do not disrupt this excellent circuit of sociality. We are humans. Our mode is to trust strangers. Without this mode, we would not be seven billion beings.

Patient First, an organization that’s been x-raying candy for the past decade in “37 centers in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania,” has yet to find this person who puts needles or bits of glass into candy. The reality? This is the reality:

“Children taking their candy to hospital on Halloween night risk involvement in traffic accidents,” along with the additional drawbacks of overcrowding radiology departments and emergency rooms with excited children, the study concluded.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

21 replies on “The Fear of Halloween Candy”

  1. There is no Donald duck acid being handed out in grade schools, no razor blades in your candy, and there is no free trip to disneyland from Microsoft.

  4. Seems like they’re taking it to the wrong lab. A chemical analyis of the junk would clearly reveal the poisons that are used in its production.

  7. @6 Yeah, like I’m gonna pay for medicinal grade and give it to the rug rats that show up at my door. This is nuts. Back to the days of Refer Madness propaganda.

  8. Across America, paranoid or justifiably cautious parents will bring in their children’s trick-or-treat goodies for screening. Their fear is that their children may have a fun time not mixed in with fear, and that the experience could leave them with a feeling of community and trust, damaging their development into paranoid, angry citizens.

  12. The only poisoned candy that ever happened was from family members trying to cash in on insurance and disguise it with Halloween paranoia. The candy was poisoned by family members after the kids brought it home.
    Meanwhile, the weather’s looking nice and sunny and I bet we won’t see more than three kids come to our door all day. Looks like I’ll be eating fun size snickers bars for a few days. Again.

  14. Uh, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to throw out the suspect candy and go and re-buy it from the store? I guess the villains could figure that out and spike the store candy as well. We have to be the only country in the world who’s bloated health care costs are partially due to x-raying Halloween candy.

  17. Part of the incredibly pervasive pattern of people making shit-stupid decisions because they don’t understand statistics. (q.v. driving; the USA PATRIOT Act; the “War on Terror”; tainted food recalls; vaccination aversion)

    Well, except that in this case, it’s not even something that’s incredible rare, it’s actually something never happens, ever, anywhere. But hey! Why not throw some radiation at the problem, just to be sure? A little radiation never hurt anybody, right?

  18. Snopes says “true” to the needles and razor blades, but “false” to Halloween poisonings. Of course, it’s still so exceedingly rare that it requires no parental action, and certainly no mention of it to the kiddies. It’s like the fact that one-in-a-million vaccines causes death should not determine your personal vaccination policy.

  20. How much does this X-ray service cost? If it costs them money they are even bigger morons than I originally thought. If it’s free then WHY THE FUCK isn’t the X-ray of my broken leg free? What is wrong with our country when limited medical resources go to stupid shit like this.

    Parents, go home and let people with actual medical conditions use the medical equipment. You’re more likely to give your kids antibiotic resistant E-coli by bringing them to the hospital than you are to catch a razor blade in their candy.

    BTW, I’ve seen a few fun sized candy bars in my day and I have yet to figure out how someone would get a razor blade inside one without me noticing before I ate the damned thing.

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