Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - BONUS SHOW #62: The Strange Origins (And Stranger Persistence) Of The ”Razor Blades In Candy” Myth

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

This is the bonus show for Episode 62! (Halloween Stores) Alex Schmidt and Jason Pargin explore the obviously incredibly fascinating topic of the U.S. and Canada's favorite Halloween urban legend: what it is, why it's a myth, and how it became one of the most persistent beliefs in North America. Originally released Sept 27th, 2021, exclusively for patrons at http://sifpod.fun/. Research sources for Alex's new intro: the journal Science: "Fainting From Fentanyl Exposure? Nope." https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fainting-fentanyl-exposure-nope CBS News: "Sen. Chuck Schumer warns drug dealers are pushing rainbow fentanyl to children" https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/sen-chuck-schumer-warns-drug-dealers-pushing-rainbow-fentanyl-to-children/ clip of scaremongering on Fox News: https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1574878436211957783 example of a scaremongering article, from Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/rainbow-fentanyl-targeted-children-lego-box-halloween-1749492 Here's a piece from The Guardian, published April 2022, covering one form the actual fentanyl crisis is taking: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/23/san-francisco-homelessness-street-team-fentanyl Source links for the original bonus episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-show-62-of-56574011

Hey folks, this is Alex, and this is a bonus release as a special thing for you. Even though you listen in the free public feed where normally you don't get any of the bonus shows, I decided to re-release one because, if nothing else, tis the season. By the way, if you're looking for the regular episode this week, there is also one of those. It's about cardboard, so look for the word cardboard in your app or player or whatever else you use to listen to the podcast. Look for the word cardboard in your app or player or whatever else you use to listen to the podcast. That cardboard show also has its own bonus show that's just for patrons, because every week I make one of those.

And last year, me and my guest Jason Pargin made a main show about Halloween stores. And then we made a bonus show about the number one myth about Halloween candy. There is a pervasive myth that comes up every year that Halloween candy will have razor blades in it or poison in it or any kind of other extreme danger that all kids in the US and Canada are about to consume if they merely go trick-or-treating. Very common news story, happens every year, is basically untrue, as you're about to hear in this bonus show. I'm also excited to re-release this 2021 bonus show in 2022, because there are new headlines about a drug called Rainbow Fentanyl, and in particular that drug Rainbow Fentanyl being a risk as something that children will think is a candy,

such as Smarties. And also either Smarties. Did you know Smarties are different in Canada? It's a chocolate candy, whole different thing. Anyway, it sort of looks like either of those. This is not just a media phenomenon. In late September of 2022, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that the U.S. needs to spend $290 million to battle Rainbow Fentanyl, and in particular because children, he says, could be tricked into consuming it. There's also all kinds of news about fentanyl because it is a powerful opioid. There is also a myth being propagated by law enforcement that if an adult person touches it with their hand, they will immediately faint or die. I'm going to link to the journal Science about exactly what's

going on with this drug. It is a drug, and also police will not die if their finger brushes against it. Anyway, this bonus show is not about rainbow fentanyl. It also is about rainbow fentanyl, because every year we have this myth in American media, in Canadian media, where parents are led to believe all of their children are about to die, because they'll go out for trick-or-treating, they'll have some Halloween candy, and it'll secretly be murder. Normally with this kind of bonus show, I would put a content warning on it because we do talk about a few cases where real kids did get harmed by their Halloween candy for really strange and basically unlucky reasons. And then a few of those stories do result in a child's death. However, I think this bonus show is also way less scary and way less of a threat to your mental health than the entire US and Canadian media every

October, right? They're putting out stories where they're saying that all of the children are about to be harmed every year, whether or not you want to see them. And so I hope this bonus show helps you roll with that, right? You'll be armed with a bit of knowledge to say, hey, that's not so much really a thing. I think we'll be okay. So that's why I'm re-releasing it. That's why I'm putting it in the main free public feed. If you heard the main episode last year about Halloween stores, you know Jason loves Halloween, and I like it quite a bit too. So in addition to the whole regular episode about cardboard that's out this week, I hope you enjoy this free release of a bonus show, and I hope it helps you have a very, very happy Halloween. We made it. We made it to the bonus episode, which means I'm enormously thankful to you.

Your donations make Secretly Incredibly Fascinating possible. That's why you get a whole other story that is great and weird and obviously incredibly fascinating. Jason, I'm very excited to get into this because it's the strange origins of the myth of razor blades and candy. And I know that sounds scary, but folks, it's a myth, except for incredibly weird specific things we'll talk about. A bunch of key sources here. The main one is an amazing piece for the New York Times' analytical journalism section called The Upshot, the piece by Aaron Carroll. Also go into history.com, CBC News, CNN, and PBS NewsHour for this. But Jason, you brought this topic up when we were planning, and I'm really glad you did.

I have definitely heard this myth that some of the houses would have like deadly razor blades tucked into the things they're handing out. And in fact, if you're in a community that doesn't do stranger trick-or-treating anymore, and they've replaced it with some event where like it's, it's organized and people are doing trick-or-treating from trunks or in a shopping mall with people who like they keep track of who's there. It's because of this. It's because of this pervasive myth that in my childhood, it was just taken as fact, which is that there is an absolute epidemic of sadistic adults who will hide needles, razor blades, or some sort of poison in like some people would give out fruit or apples. And everyone, everyone knew a kid who claimed or whose parents claimed that they had gotten an apple from a house and cut it open and they found razor blades inside of it. And this was something that I don't know if it's still

pervasive today among the youth, if it's largely been debunked enough but i still see there's like a joke meme that goes around every halloween where people will photoshop like a gun or a chainsaw like bad like badly wrapped in a little snickers wrapper and it's like look at what we found in my our daughter's bag last night please be careful there are some sick bastards out there that's what they're referencing because in when i was a kid in school, we had an assembly at our elementary school. Like we gathered where the teacher brought up parents to testify that they had found needles and snicker bars. And then they would always say, you'll never accept unwrapped candy or any kind of food. Only take prepackaged candy bars, because otherwise there's a really good chance it has been tampered with. And it's not that this has never, ever, ever happened. It's that the instances of it are so unbelievably rare that it's almost like the perfect example of a moral panic. Yeah, it's not, there's not a sea of people trying to do this, which is, I think,

what, well, it's certainly what you were told at that assembly. And I mean, it's a memory as a child, so you probably don't know, but did the parents telling these stories seem convincing? I mean, we were little kids. And again, what they were alleging wasn't outrageous. It was in the same tone as learning about, you know, being careful when swimming on the beach to watch out for the undertow or, you know, we're not petting strange dogs because they may be they may bark. It's just it was accepted as little kids. Oh, yeah. Some adults will booby trap your food because because the world is full of psychopaths and we're obsessed with the idea of you know and again we'll get into stats but there are much much more common dangers that no one

cares about because it's one of those things where it's spread because it's an incredibly weird thing to do and a crime that is if you think about it for five seconds almost impossible to get away with like somebody's gonna remember where they got the apple that had razor blades pounded into it or or the one house that was giving out unwrapped candy bars like you would never forget that for the rest of your life it's like oh yeah she was getting unwrapped like you would immediately tell the cops but we didn didn't just believe it. It was something that was just accepted the way the existence of God was just accepted. It wasn't debated. It's just, this is gravity exists. And also, you know, be careful when only trick or treat houses,

you know, because you know, every third stranger is trying to, to mutilate your mouth. as you know because you know every third stranger is trying to to mutilate your mouth yeah that's it's such a traceable crime like i i would probably retain a solid memory of which house handed out apples like regular good apples that are fruit and healthy for you be like oh this wasn't snickers man i'm mad at 317 tamarack they're they're the worst uh yeah that's the whole thing with like the halloween vandalisms you'd come back and and like toilet paper their their tree or whatever because they gave out bad candy or they didn't have candy or whatever that's the trick or treat take your pick you can either give us a treat or we'll play a trick on you by destroying your property that's what trick or treat means.

And then, yeah, as far as experiencing the myth, I have a memory of like going through my pillowcase of candy at the end of a Halloween run and getting rid of the one baked good. And I don't know if it was specifically, it might be razor blades. I think it might've just been at a minimum, I was told like anything that's not a factory wrapped candy bar is suspicious or might have something in it, or you might be allergic or we have no idea. So yeah, there, there's a real, not that, not that candy bars are great for you, but it was like a known quantity that that was what we were allowed to consume at the end of the night. I, I'm going to say that regardless of what the grownups told you, it was fear of it having been tampered with, that they had you throw it out.

Even though, again, the percentage of adults in America that would intentionally risk everything to bake poison cookies to make a bunch of kids sick or kill them is microscopic. That person exists. I'm not saying that person doesn't exist. We can all read newspapers, but they are extremely rare in society to the point that I would think the danger that it presents in terms of making them what it makes them believe about adults is actually worse than the risk of getting a razor blade in your apple, if it makes sense. I think other people would disagree with me, but I think we spent the entire 80s and the whole stranger danger thing was teaching kids that adults are monsters. And I think that induced a view of the world that is more harmful than what the monsters were. It's by

just making you scared of getting out in the neighborhood to where now kids, you know, don't necessarily walk home alone from school anymore. They get picked up in a car because God forbid, who knows what could happen. Yeah. And I'm glad we're starting with, hey, this is basically a myth. The actual incidences, there's microscopic number, and it's weird situations. Because also there are, not to make people scared, but there are actual things to keep an eye out for on Halloween night. And New York Times Upshot gets into it very well. And it's not that you need to be afraid of all your neighbors or afraid of razor blades. neighbors are afraid of razor blades. It's that this writer, Aaron Carroll, who's also a pediatrician,

he points out that statistically, American kids are more likely to be hit by a car on Halloween night than any other night. The pedestrian fatality rate for four to eight year olds was 10 times higher than on other nights. It's mostly because there are just a lot more kids on the street. It's also because a lot of costumes are dark colored, whether it's like a ghoul or Batman or something else where it's a lot of black and a lot of dark colors. You know, you don't need to be paranoid about this, but just walk carefully through your neighborhood at night when you are in a weird outfit getting candy. It's very important to do. Yeah, because we do live in a dangerous world. Cars kill tens of thousands of people every year. People die all the time. It's just that those dangers are mostly very boring. And so we did not have a school assembly saying,

look, wear something reflective, carry a flashlight so you're visible, because that's boring. And the adults don't find that interesting. But the moment there's like rumors of like a Satan worshiping cult or something in town poisoning candy, now that gets everybody's juices going. Now that's something we can talk about. So information travels not based on how useful it is, but on how weird it is. But it's weird because it's rare. So we wind up focusing on the rare dangers rather than the everyday real dangers, like getting hit by careless drivers or, or on, you know, these days a drunken driver. Yeah. I, and, and as you were prepping this, I was thinking about how, like I have been hit by a car as a pedestrian, as an adult when I was in LA and you know, I'm fine now, but I've been warned about

a lot of things a lot more often than, Hey, some drivers, when they're trying to make a hard left turn in Los Feliz, won't look for you. Like that, or I guess that's a super specific warning, but like the, the thing of walk safely, wear bright stuff at night. That's not like in PSAs all the time. It's, it's usually, Hey, third grader, somebody's going to offer you cocaine. So the officer from the police station is here to tell you all about it and give you a D.A.R.E. T-shirt. Yeah. And where I cannot in a thousand years imagine ever booby trapping candy for a kid, I have hit five pedestrians in my car just in the last few years. It happens all the time.

It's an extremely common danger. Well, I'm glad you've done the right thing and apologized for starting taping late today. Because, you know, hitting a guy is one thing, but making this start late, I was very upset. I couldn't handle it. Pedestrians need to learn to share the road with cars. The roads were made for cars. But seriously, folks, but seriously, folks, it is along with what we were saying in the main

episode about Halloween being a bigger drinking night. Of course, that has made it a bigger drunk driving night. CNN says that 44% of all car crash deaths on Halloween involve a drunk driver. That's coming from the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration. And then totally separately, CNN also says that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says the leading cause of Halloween injuries and Halloween pains and troubles is pumpkin carving. Like as kids, you know, generations of American kids were getting told like, watch out for blades in your candy. And also here's a knife you need to like do experimental gourd carving right now, because it's the holiday. It's just normal. You know,

like, like there are, it's a big blade holiday when you think about it, but not in the way that people are afraid of. Yeah. Again, neither me nor any of my friends ever got tampered candy, but I have stabbed myself with a knife while trying to carve a pumpkin on exactly 100% of the times I have tried to carve a pumpkin. Because it is actually a challenging carving task. The husk is very tough. It's difficult to get through unless you've got a really good knife. And if you've got a really good sharp knife, then you're going to puncture your

hand at some point because it's not something you ever do. It's a series of completely unfamiliar motions that you're making with a blade. And it's also a big, like, be sure to plan ahead for what you're going to do. It's like, no, I'm a child. be sure to plan ahead for what you're gonna do it's like no i'm a child i don't plan anything obviously i'm just going in i guess this will be the eye in the middle of the nose now great but yeah and back to this this urban legend uh again you don't need to be afraid of it because it is so not prevalent it's also a myth that varies the way it's told. I've heard it as razor blades and candy. I've also heard it as razor blades and apples. There's also a version where it's candy laced with poison, so there's no blades,

but it's poisonous chemicals. And in most cases, this is coming from the media framing the story as a case of Halloween sadism. And the whole explanation is that just somebody has a messed up impulse to harm people. And, you know, open and shut case, like it's a psycho and watch out is ends up being kind of the whole story of what we're going to get into here, some real cases of people having, you know, a deadly or bad night on Halloween that is not coming from that. Yeah. And sadists exist, but the problems in society are not largely generated by the sadists. It's similar to, I referenced like the satanic panic of the 80s and the belief that devil-worshiping cults were kidnapping children and murdering them.

And it's just more fun to think about that than to think about the fact that most abusive kids happens at the hands of their parents or their caregivers. If you've got a kid that has died, it's more likely due to neglect or due to the failure of institutions or the failure of any authorities to intervene when they saw problem signs. all of these things that are very real, but are very boring to talk about. And they're kind of downers. Yeah. Whereas the idea of an exotic serial killer type personality sitting there at his lab, like carefully inserting, spending hours carefully inserting needles into fruit in a way that can't be detected from the outside.

That's exciting. That's interesting. That's novel. It's cool. It's something new. And we just so much would prefer that that be the face of evil rather than just poverty. Dad's in jail. mom's a drug addict the kid is being neglected like that's just sad but you know it's the idea that your middle class white child could be harmed by a an exotic sadist booby trapping candy like well that's stuff that

gets people talking that that's the that's the subject of gossip and whatever it's almost a hopeful belief in a very very sad and messed up way like it's this belief that if we can eliminate a few bad actors with with hannibal lector type minds then all of the world's problems are solved when actually it's more complicated and then more difficult yeah and also the belief as as time goes on, you can, I referenced this in previous episodes, or maybe it was a different podcast I did, but the concept that America has become a low trust society, that people, you know, don't let their kids ride the subway alone, that people don't let their kids often walk home from school by themselves. A lot of that is due to a few decades of the idea that most people are not trustworthy or that cannot, you know,

that the world of strangers is full of kidnappers and predators and all of that. Yeah. That's relatively new. It's due to mass media and it's a pretty fundamental cultural shift because it makes life harder to live in general in addition to making people miserable. But the idea that this type of exotic dedicated sadist or psychopath is so common that every neighborhood has at least one. Yeah. To make this work like that's what has to be true, but also that is crazy. Yeah, the numbers aren't there. And with this specific myth, a sociologist has done the numbers. Multiple sources have covered it. It's a University of Delaware sociology and criminal

justice professor named Joel Best. And he co-authored a 1985 study of this phenomenon known as Halloween sadism. And what he did is he got every major US newspapers report that he could find from 1958 through 1984. So almost three decades, every major newspaper report he could find that called something Halloween sadism. And then what he did is he just like followed up, like he called hospitals, he called police stations, he did further hunting for verification of the story. And quoting the New York Times now, quote, Dr. Best found that they were all pretty much jokes gone awry or unverifiable rumors, end quote. And then also he's continued tracking this since the 80s. And he says that from 1958 all the way to 2019, so more than 60 years, from 1958 all the way to 2019,

he's been able to identify about 200 confirmed cases of candy tampering in the US and Canada. So only about three a year across those two humongous countries. Because yes, this happens every once in a while. And it is not something that's super common. And then also, back to the New York Times again, quote, in all the data, Dr. Best found no evidence that any child had been seriously injured, let alone killed, by strangers tampering with candy, end quote. Because we're going to have some stories of children dying from candy or after eating candy, but it's not from this maniacal person down the street situation. Right, because even those couple of cases a year they stumbled across, it's not fitting the archetype of the dedicated sadist who is like carefully booby trapping a whole bunch of stuff to give out.

And then even when they could find those, you didn't find anyone who had successfully actually eaten it or gotten hurt by it. eaten it or gotten hurt by it. It's not just rare, but it's like in each case there's specific circumstances. But the thing that everyone, that my elementary school assembly was about, basically doesn't exist. It would be, I can't even think of an equivalent. Because if you compared something like shark attacks, like more people get eaten by sharks than that even. Like that's another thing that people are too afraid of. But even that is more common than than this. And then and also we have numbers for Canada in particular, because

the CBC has done a lot of investigation of this and the Canadian government to CBC talked to a government agency called the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. And they said from April 2008 to mid-October 2019, so more than a decade, they received a total of four official reports of candy tampering. And so that's less than one per two years. They also had no confirmed illnesses or deaths as a result of these couple of alleged cases of candy tampering. And then the CBC reached out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, also reached out

to local police in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto, and Halifax. None of those agencies had any information to provide about candy tampering or kids getting harmed by it. It's a thing that seems to, we've got several reasons here, it comes up, but it seems to come from confusion, misreporting, you know, no, no like actual situations where somebody was gunning for the neighborhood kids. Yeah. But it has all the hallmarks of any kind of a viral story. And I've always, I've always been happy that we've used like disease and epidemic terminology for

information like that, something being viral, because it truly is a fact that is designed to make you share it because it's so outrageous and it's so scary and it's so weird. And the thought of a person, any person doing this to a child, it's so out there that the idea that it's common is so outrageous. You have to do something about it. And the point where you first stop and make sure it's true, the human brain usually just skips right over that. It's based on how striking it is, not how well it's supported. it's based on how striking it is, not how well it's supported. And this is something that ultimately was shared purely because it's, it's striking and it's children, you know, false harm to children.

Same thing with, with like QAnon, like it's, it has to start with kids being harmed. And that's something that, because, well, gosh, if I don't share it, I'm putting children at risk. Yeah. And even in the run up to taping this, I thought about, I realized that I had not thought about this myth since I was a kid. And then I quickly realized, oh, I haven't thought about it because I don't have children. Like, you know, if you have children, suddenly your heart is on the outside of your body and you have a bunch of reasons to care about this. And yeah, so I can, I can, it's just such a crucial thing to get right that, you know, all these parents jumped on it, but, but it's not a thing to worry about. And people mistakenly think, well, there's,

it's better safe than sorry. You know, it's like better to believe it. And, you know, even if it's extremely rare, like even now there may be people listening and saying, wow, it happened a couple of times, you know, a year, a few times a year, that's not nothing. And it's like, okay. In a country or in a couple of countries with a combined, I don't know, 400 million people or whatever, something, everything happens a few times a year. Like somebody gets eaten by a pig three times a year. That many people, anything happens. People have died with Christmas trees falling on them probably more times than that. It's just in that? And then the rest of the episode is how these stories keep getting sparked and get spread around.

And first reason here is the actual version of what gets called fake news. It's just a poorly reported story, has happened once in a while in a way that sparks this. New York Times cites the death of a child named Patrick Weterhold in Flint, Michigan in 1978. Also the death of a child named Ariel Katz in Santa Monica, California in 1990. They say those are two situations where local media reported that death as some being from poisoned candy. However, in both cases, when people followed up on it, they found that the hospital never said that, like just somebody handling some local story jumped to that. Also, in Katz's case, they specifically figured out that when Katz died, the local police jumped to warning kids not to touch any of their candy, because maybe that's

the cause. And that turned out to be unnecessary. But this police action got reported. And you know, those kind of stories spread very fast. Like that can be enough of a germ for, you know, especially a busy parent or especially a busy person to just say, well, this must be what's happening. Weren't everybody really cannot emphasize enough that the police are not always a great source of this kind of thing. The police tend to jump on moral panic things just as quickly as anybody else. Yeah. The satanic panic in the eighties, a lot of that came straight from police, you know, going on the news and saying, well, if you've got signs of, you know, devil worship in

your neighborhood, please, you know, contact us. And if you see your kids in possession of, you know, anything that has a pentagram on it, you know, you should be concerned because they may be about to participate in a human sacrifice. Like it was the police saying that. And the media has had a habit for as long as America has been around of completely uncritically reporting what the police say. Yeah. As if, well, they would know. And no, it turns out that's actually not true whatsoever. It's, they have their own agenda. And in many cases, they are just as quick to jump onto rumors as anybody. Yeah.

Now I'm just wondering if there are any studies or polls or analyses of how many people understand the difference between a police officer and a detective. I think people just figure every police officer is also investigative and every police decision is based on investigation. And that's not true. I think they get it from TV. They've seen Law & Order a lot. Or that the police immediately have an accurate understanding of statistical danger or whatever.

It's very easy to just tell, oh, all the kids, throw all your Halloween candy away. There's poison candy out there. It's very easy to go on the news and say that, but it's not like that's coming from a place of actually understanding the scale of any kind of risk or anything like that. There's nothing stopping them because, again, they figure, well, better safe than sorry. But no, not really. You're ruining everybody's holiday based on a misunderstanding. covers in 1970, the media reported that a child named Kevin Totson was killed by candy sprinkled with heroin. However, like actual investigation after those stories found that Totson's candy stash got contaminated by his uncle's heroin stash after he brought it home. So he just like

set it next to it somehow. And then that's how the drugs got into it and killed him. set it next to it somehow. And then that's how the drugs got into it and killed him. They also cover in 1974, there was a child named Timothy O'Brien. He died from a cyanide-laced pixie stick. But investigators later determined after actually looking into it, that the boy's father poisoned that pixie stick on purpose, killed him on purpose after taking out a life insurance policy on him, which is, of course, just heinous and terrible. And then also, it's not this myth. You don't need to be paranoid that every doorfront on your street is going to give you poison. It's this other just sad murder thing. Yeah. Drug use among parents, very real, very common. Drug use among parents that impacts kids in horrible ways very real

very common abusive parents um you know yeah very real very common these are real things there are institutional failures here there are cultural failures those are real and that should be reported as that that way like yeah drugs are a real problem um but it's that's very different from somebody who has bought heroin and then has chosen to use their precious heroin stash to poison a bunch of strangers halloween candy that's most heroin users want to keep it for themselves yeah that's true they do they do prioritize uh maintaining control over the supply that's true yeah yeah it was like the peer pressure thing i heard in the 80s that i would constantly have bullies coming up to me forcing me to take to snort their cocaine like that stuff is expensive

if they were able to afford cocaine not even their their best friend was going to get some of it that is theirs yeah it's of it. That is theirs. Yeah, it's not like when you go apple picking and then you have too many and you can't give it away. Very different. It's a whole different situation. Well, and next reason here is that there was a whole different story with poison grocery items that basically got lumped into Halloween

and got wrapped up in it, especially with Halloween kind of growing into more and more of this thing we spend money on in the late 20th century. There's a, I think, pretty famous story, maybe just because I was in the area where it had just happened growing up, but there were the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders. be 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders. It's a real thing that actually happened where store bought Tylenol in the Chicago area in 1982. It turned out to be laced with cyanide in a way that I think as far as people understand was not an accident. Somebody did something nefarious. They don't know who, we don't know how, but seven people died, more than 31 million bottles of Tylenol were recalled, and that changed U.S. food packaging and drug packaging standards. But the potentially sadistic, potentially nefarious act there, that seems to have just gotten lumped in with Halloween stories where people said, well, if this trusted headache medicine can be poisonous,

be very spooked by everything in your bag of candy. Watch out. Yeah. And again, if you look at that recall versus all the times that stuff had to be recalled just because the factory was negligent and they, you know, you had an E. coli outbreak with meat or something like that. There's no comparison. This is the Tylenol murders are famous because it's the only time something like that has happened on that scale. And it changed. The reason your pills, the reason your food has like that little safety seal under the lid. This is why.

And the next reason here, it's pretty weird. And the next reason here, and it's pretty weird, but it's that, yes, every once in a while, a kid does eat a piece of Halloween candy with metal in it. But it's so rare and it's so strange, it's often hard to tell why that even happened. Like maybe it got in there in the factory somehow. It never has the pattern of a creepy psychopath trying to do this to the whole neighborhood. Yeah, there's been many recalls of products where they found metal shavings. That was not because of a sadist. That's because of the gigantic factory that spits out 8 million of these candy bars a minute. It had a bushing or something that ground itself down, and they did not maintain the machine properly,

and they noticed that it had dropped some metal into it, and then they had to throw out the whole batch. Usually it does not reach the consumer before that happens, but occasionally everyone probably remembers having gotten something that had some little bit of an object or something that apparently came there from the factory. At least I've had at least a couple of things like that where it's like, oh, they left a screwdriver in this meatloaf.

Right. It's a human error thing. One example of it comes from the CBC. They say that there was a particularly serious case in 2017 where an 11-year-old girl in Cambridge, Ontario, ate a Reese's peanut butter cup that contained a metal object. She had to have oral surgery to correct the damage that happened. But Waterloo Regional Police told the Cambridge Times that they were unsure if the metal was put into the candy intentionally

or if it was a manufacturing issue, end quote. Like, it's this factory thing that doesn't just happen with Halloween candy. It's all kinds of food. This can happen. And you hope that your national standards and safety protocols stop it. Yeah. And again, manufacturers avoid this kind of thing because they don't want people to stop buying their product. So it's their concern is, you know, even the lax U.S. government standards, it's not even that. They don't want parents being afraid to buy Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. So they actually do, you know, I'm guessing in all the candy bars you've eaten in your entire life,

very few have you run into some foreign object in there. It's extremely, extremely rare. Even in the world of capitalism where you're trying to cut costs at every turn, they generally try to make sure that nothing terrible falls into your food. Yeah, even if people remember the ketchup episode of this podcast, we talk about Heinz partly succeeding and becoming the dominant ketchup brand because they would put it in clear bottles. They were like, oh, we'll let you see what's in it. And people were like, wow, a food that might not be totally poison and metal. That's pretty exciting. I should check this out. And the government didn't make Heinz do that. It was just a good idea. Yeah. And another story here is from the Cincinnati area in 2019. Apparently a suburban

father around Cincinnati discovered a razor blade in one piece of his kid's Halloween candy. And the police response jumps out to me because this is what the dad said, quote, police basically told me without me knowing exactly which house it came from, there's nothing to do but monitor to see if any other incidents happen, end quote. And then it happened one other time with one other house. And the dad says the police came and just collected the candy as evidence. And then that was kind of it. So obviously, if somebody was trying to do a wave of this across the neighborhood, it didn't happen. And also the police didn't even track it that hard. Like there's just not there's not a whole wave of this going on. And there's not a whole crime stopping apparatus to prevent it either. Yeah. And again, that's something we pointed out earlier. It's a crime that even if you had

someone who was sadistic and hated children or wanted to get revenge on the neighborhood kids or whatever, it's just a crime that one is difficult. You've got to sit down and devote time to tampering because again, you're not just tampering with it. You're tampering with it in a way that's undetectable. So you're talking about unwrapping it and then rewrapping it or trying to puncture the skin of an apple without it being visible. Like you would have to sit there and practice it. And then it's just extremely difficult to get away with. It wouldn't be that hard to remember where you got that one candy because you're not hitting thousands of houses.

You're hitting a couple dozen. And if you're familiar with the neighborhood you're walking in, no, you're not going to get away with it. The idea that this would be an epidemic, you would also have many, many famous trials of people getting convicted for doing it. And that's the other thing that you simply don't have. So much of it is just anecdotal or whatever. Exactly, Yeah. And there's even this great CBC article because they get into one situation where there was a trial for this and where it seems to have happened. They say that in the year 2000, James J. Smith of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was charged with felony adulteration after four teenagers told police they received chocolate

bars that were later found to contain needles. And they also say one of the children was reportedly injured by a needle, but did not require medical attention and the other three kids were fine. And then also once the like justice system got on it, they immediately decided that James J. Smith was unfit to stand trial and there was a petition to commit him to a mental health facility because you would have to be this out of your mind to even do it and in a case of someone trying to do the the horrible arts and crafts of assembling it it didn't even do the the terrible thing that maybe they did or did not want to do. It's just such a rabbit hole of things that don't make sense to do, even as crimes go.

Yeah, it was immediately caught. But then the last reason here is kind of the most interesting to me. It is what the sociologist, Dr. Best, described as one of the main reasons. It's a joke going awry. It's like somebody messing with candy because they're trying to be funny. Comedy, pretty hard to do. It's a joke going awry. It's like somebody messing with candy because they're trying to be funny. Comedy, pretty hard to do. It's difficult to do, especially a prank that can end up just being hurtful, that genre of comedy a lot of the time. But some of these cases come from people trying to do like a gag, and then it spawns this urban legend of poisonous, dangerous candies. spawns this urban legend of poisonous, dangerous candies. An example from the New York Times is that in 1964, a woman named Helen Feil gave children packages of insect traps, clearly marked as poison, insect traps, also packages of steel wool pads and dog biscuits wrapped in

aluminum foil. And they say that she said she had done so as a joke, because she felt many of the children trick-or-treating at her house were too old to participate. Though no children were harmed, she was arrested and committed to a state hospital for observation, and the episode made national news." She was just trying to do the gag of, what if Halloween candy was bad was bad ha ha ha and like unappealing but then it seems like psycho behavior because that's not that's not a joke you can actually do in real life and have it work yeah and also unsafe like you're handing out you know insect traps to little kids who may think they're toys or whatever like it's a very dumb thing to do but also uh in 1964 at that time it wasn't a good

prank unless it could almost kill somebody uh so like this is actually it's pranks used to be different back then you can watch any movie from the 80s and you'll you'll get a sense of pranks used to be much more dangerous it's actually i mean ultimately she gave little kids something that could have harmed them and and that's why she got arrested but right but yeah yeah prank culture used to be hardcore like what if i push my fellow construction worker off the hoover dam or whatever like ah that'll be a good time and no it was like the flaming the flaming bag of dog poop thrown on somebody's porch. And the joke is, you've seen this in a million 80s movies, and the guy comes out and stomps it out, and they get dog poop all over their shoe.

It's like, if the guy didn't come to the door, you would have burned his house down. Oh, yeah. Like, what if he'd been in the shower or something and didn't hear the doorbell ring? Or what if he'd been asleep, and now his porch is just on fire right that was a real prank people old timers insisted they actually did even though it requires you to literally pick up some dog poop so it seems like the joke is on you uh but it's like oh no yeah you'd almost you'd try to you'd almost burn somebody's house down all the time just because it was funny they get some poop on their shoe. Right. You just did an arson or murder now.

Great. Great. Hope that was fun. Yeah. And another example here, a little bit more hardcore, but this is 1959. There was a California dentist named William Shine. And apparently what he did is he gave 450 kids candies that he had laced with laxatives. And then, you know, they took effect. And apparently about 30 of the kids had a big reaction and got sick. But nobody died. And then also Shine was charged with outrage of public decency and charged with something called unlawful dispensing of drugs. and charged with something called unlawful dispensing of drugs.

It's basically a poop joke. Like it's basically, wouldn't it be funny if all the kids pooped their pants? Oh, spiking stuff with laxatives is a joke that still turns up in comedies. Yeah. People don't do this. This can kill somebody. But that turns up in comedies made last year. And in the 80s movies, like every third one had a prank where they spiked the punch at a wedding with laxatives or spiked the wedding cake or the food at a party and then

everybody pooped themselves it's hilarious because they're all running to the bathroom at the same time do not do this it's you're not controlling the amount they're getting it can cause all sorts of problems from dehydration to everything else. But movies still portray this as like a harmless prank to this day. And the guy probably had seen a wacky movie where that happened. Yeah, like it's so much more of a real motivation than the Halloween sadist motivation. Like, yeah, kind of watch out for your neighbor who truly doesn't understand comedy or pharmaceuticals and thinks they're going to do this.

But also it won't happen. But, you know, yeah, don't do it. Don't really get scared about it. But it makes more sense than somebody being a psychopath. And I will say, even now, if you go out trick-or-treating and somebody is handing out unwrapped candy bars don't eat them yeah yeah that's an extremely weird thing to do like this guy was this guy i'm assuming he had to take in the candy i was packaging to put the laxatives in in general anybody's handing out unwrapped unwrapped food it's even if they're not they haven't poisoned it, a probably good idea to just go ahead and not eat that.

Yeah, they come wrapped, like an unwrapped Christmas gift. I'm like, okay, they didn't want to do the work or they didn't want to find old comics or something to do it. But yeah, an unwrapped candy bar, it's like, what's up? Loose chocolates are just a chaos I don't want in any situation. Yeah, they're just getting smeared all over the other stuff in your bag. Although I am curious, perhaps as a point of discussion among the Patreon subscribers, is if you, your kids went out trick-or-treating and they did get baked goods, like cookies wrapped in shrink wrap or whatever that somebody just made, like saran wrap, like they just made them

in their kitchen do you let them eat those because i actually don't have kids alex you said in your youth you were not allowed to i would be curious to if people want to talk among themselves to hear is that something that's okay with your kids to take baked goods from a stranger yeah same maybe i'll maybe i'll make a twitter poll out of it or something. Yeah. Because it is like, I can see reasons to not allow it even beyond this myth, too. Like, I don't know. And also, I'm fortunate to not have one. But I assume kids with nut allergies just don't take any candy on Halloween or something. That's a whole different life to me.

And people with nut allergies, I think they just sit out everything that's ever been baked by a stranger. But like I was in the park, like it was last year and there were some girls that were selling cupcakes for, they claimed their school or something. And I just bought one and just ate it right there in the park without a second thought when that could have been a prank or they could have made them wrong or who knows but it's like oh no cupcakes i'm a trash can i'll put anything in my body i don't i don't care i did i didn't even i didn't consider it just gave him the two bucks and just ate the cupcake right there okay i guess in retrospect that probably was maybe I'm maybe I've gone too far the other direction. So regret to inform you, this whole taping was a sixth sense.

You have died. And this is just although I guess that's bad for me. I'm talking to a ghost. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's bad for me now. We all lose. Happy Halloween, everybody.

Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the podcast. Bonus sources are in the bonus post at sifpod.fun. Next week, a whole new bonus.