Pills, Needles Found in Halloween Candy: How Common Is This?
Every year, as Halloween costumes are put back in the closet and trick-or-treaters begin counting their loot, news stories break about candy that has been tampered with — parents report finding needles, razor blades, and other sharp objects in their kids’ goodies. This year is no different. Needles buried in wrapped Twix bars were reported in Pennsylvania, an Ohio teen said she found a razor in her bite-size Snickers, and a New York mom said her daughter’s candy had an unidentified pill buried inside it. But more often than not, these incidents are eventually found to be hoaxes perpetrated by kids, and one expert says the threat of dangerous candy is more fiction than fact.
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At least one report of contaminated Halloween candy has already been proven false. An 11-year-old in Massachusetts claimed to find metal in her Hershey’s chocolate bar, but local police posted on Facebook on Sunday that “after interviewing [the girl] along with her mother, it has been determined that the entire story was a fabrication created by the child.”
Joel Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware and an expert on this candy-tampering phenomenon, dubbed “Halloween sadism,” tells Yahoo Parenting that the attention and fear surrounding the issue is overblown. “I’ve been studying this since 1958, and the first thing you find [when looking at the press surrounding Halloween sadism] is that there really aren’t that many cases reported, and there are never reports of fatalities or serious injuries. The dangerous object is always discovered before any damage is done,” Best says. “You can’t prove a negative — that is, I can’t prove that a child has never been injured by a needle in their chocolate — but I’ve never heard about it, and there certainly hasn’t been a high body count.”
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Halloween is, in fact, a big day for child injuries, Best says, but they’re almost never candy related. “They are the result of sending tens of millions of kids out into the street in the dark, who unfortunately get hit by cars or get caught up in their costumes and fall down and hurt themselves, but they aren’t showing up with razor blades or cuts in their mouths,” he says.
Sticking a needle inside a Snickers is a relatively easy thing to do, Best says, and a trick that is in keeping with the spooky Halloween spirit. “It’s consistent with the traditional scary nature of the holiday. Any 12-year-old can put a pin in a candy bar and run in and show their parents and scare them,” he says. “In my view, this is a contemporary urban legend. It’s not something that parents actually have to worry about.”
It is possible, though, that parents are hearing about these incidents more due to social media, Best says. When he started researching incidents of Halloween sadism, Best looked at the reports in three major papers: the New York Times, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune. Today, it’s much easier to come across reports from local news sites, or for kids to report an incident themselves on Facebook or YouTube, Best says, and that’s enough to send anxiety-ridden parents into a panic.
Many police departments do issue warnings that parents should go through their kids’ treats before letting them dig in, but Best doesn’t think it’s necessary. “I never went through my kids’ candy,” he says. “I believe my own research enough that I never thought it necessary.”
Photo: Sean Freese/ Flickr
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