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The Wall Street Journal has a great story about how America has gone stranger-danger-crazy, especially on Halloween:

Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it’s probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.

Take “stranger danger,” the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the “Bewitched” and “Brady Bunch” costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.

That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)

If you’re looking for a good book about how Americans live in fear of all the wrong things, you should read Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear. It’s a level-headed look at how the news media inspires us to live in fear of statistically irrelevant things. The book was published in 2000; I wish Glassner would do a post-9/11 update on all the different ways fear has taken hold on every level of American society.

(Via The Awl.)

19 replies on “Nobody Is Poisoning Halloween Candy”

  7. When I was little, the hospital in my small town would x-ray your kid’s Halloween candy for free to check for razor blades, etc. This in a town where we knew the names of every family in our neighborhood.

    My parents never brought our candy in to be checked (I like to think they are pretty rational people). My dad did confiscate all of my Mounds & Almond Joys though…. for safety reasons.

  10. and the reason pools don’t have diving boards anymore? 1 kid dove off a dock into a lake and broke his neck. therefore china gets to win all the diving medals.

  11. Oh, the razorblades-in-the-apples meme has been around since at least the mid-1960’s – my mom, bless her over-protective self, would actually throw out apples and the occasional orange, even if there was no obvious sign of tampering, which of course there never was.

    Strangely, so long as we got to keep all the candy (which, so far as I can recall was never inspected; this being the pre-hypodermic-syringe-shooting-drugs-into-the-candy-meme era), us kids didn’t really mind losing the fruit…

  12. Nobody bothered to go through our candy in the 1950s — we kids ignored apples because really — fucking apples! on Halloween?

    We despised the cheapos who tried to pass off popcorn balls, or even candied apples for candy, candy, fer chrissakes mister, give us candy!

    The neighbors knew better than to give oranges to kids they knew, because they knew they’d get the fish eye from us.

    The only danger we faced was Dad getting up in the middle of the night and raiding our stash.

    I guess our parents were too paranoid about Commies nuking the country, to dream up more local illogical fears.

  13. I took a sociology class from Barry Glassner my freshman year at USC, 1999. After 4 years of HS science, that was the class where I first understood the scientific method. Easily one of the top classes from my entire college education. I still have this book and re-read it occasionally.

  14. My mother was way ahead of the curve, paranoia-wise. I remember her going through my loot from Halloween in the mid-60s, tossing anything homemade or unsealed (including the divinity from the sweet little old lady next door), and inspecting every candy wrapper for pinholes. No shit. She also told me so many horror stories about letting strange men touch me or talk me into being touched that there is a picture of me at age 8 standing near Santa Claus. I wasn’t ABOUT to sit in his lap, for chrissakes! (My then-16-year-old sister did, though, and got a date. So maybe Mom was right about Santa.)

  15. Is this the reason for the “trick or treating” in business districts these days? That was just starting up when I was a kid, and, even then, I sneered at it. Among other things, back in my day, those businesses always gave out crappy candy.

  18. This debunking of cherished myths is just another step in the transformation from real Halloween to Sexoween. Used to be the point of it was to be scared.

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