Where Did the Fear of Poisoned Halloween Candy Come From? (2013)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
One of the things I like about the sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc) is that we're slowly being reminded that it's okay to trust our neighbors, despite the constant attempts by the media to spread fear.
Even if this were a viable solution, it does nothing for the lost sleep during the months (or in may case, full year) it takes to establish these rules and get them consistently enforced.
Also, it's not a viable solution. There are a couple huge problems.
First, evicting owners is no small thing. In fact, neither is evicting renters. In fact, neither is fining owners/renters for sums of money that would actually cause a change in behavior. These are all very expensive options of last resort that are likely to end in lawyer fees.
Second, with notable exceptions, HOAs/land lords dislike playing mediator/enforcer (and for good reason -- see below). So rules are hard to make and harder to enforce.
Third, there's a real cost imposed on any community that tries to legislate "be a normal neighbor". If you want an enumeration of the potential downsides of this approach, talk to anyone who has had a bad experience with an over-zealous HOA.
You could try to make and enforce a set of rules in a way that solves the problem but doesn't drive normal neighbors insane with pedantic/vindictive rule-violation-reporting. But it turns out that's a rather hard set of rules to come up with/fairly enforce. It's just much easier and, frankly, more effective, to ban airbnb et al.
I'm not opposed to apartment sharing on principle, and in fact my personal political philosophy should bias me toward defending the practice. But my actual experience makes me wary of buildings/neighborhoods that allow airbnb. If airbnb doesn't figure out a solution to this problem, they're going to face increasing resistance.
I don't understand that argument. It might make months to establish a ban or effective enforcement of temporary tenants as well. Obviously that sucks, but I'm just trying to think about which rule would be more effective and reasonable.
> First, evicting owners is no small thing. In fact, neither is evicting renters. In fact, neither is fining owners/renters for sums of money that would actually cause a change in behavior. These are all very expensive options of last resort that are likely to end in lawyer fees.
Again, I don't understand. Those are the exact same options we have to disincentivize owners/renters taking in temporary tenants. What alternative enforcement mechanism are you suggesting?
It seems like you're focusing on the difficulties in enforcing my suggestion without recognizing that literally the exact same difficulties exist in enforcing your suggestion.
All it takes is one person who does.
> One of the things I like about the sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc) is that we're slowly being reminded that it's okay to trust our neighbors
Except it's not neighbors but complete strangers you're asked to trust, and that trust is sometime misplaced. There's absolutely no difference in that between the "sharing economy" (which has little to do with sharing) and just plain economy.
And keep in mind that it's not in fact random strangers you interact with, there and in many other situations - an activity can be more dangerous than the random chance of meeting a dangerous criminal would indicate, when it attracts such criminals more than it attracts other people, possibly because it makes it easier for them to find victims or evade detection.
None of which matters for Halloween candy, since it's provided by actual neighbors and so common that it really is basically random.
> Except it's not neighbors but complete strangers you're asked to trust, and that trust is sometime misplaced.
I'm guessing you've never lived in a place where the common means of transportation is to just stand by the street, look for the next car coming by with empty seats, and signal/ask how much it is to your destination?
What kind of a strawman is that? Where did I ever suggest you should just "accept assault by taxi drivers"? Go report them so that we can weed them out. Nobody suggested we do nothing.
1000 people gaining a little bit quickly outweighs 1 person losing a lot (at least from a purely utilitarian perspective)
In my experience that assumption is usually false. There are usually ways where you can actually reduce the amount of danger and the number of people exposed to it and increase the number of people getting a more efficient service at the same time.
Look for these outward movements of the efficient frontier. The opportunity is almost always there. When we're really at the efficient frontier of what is possible and have no choice but to make tradeoffs let's say so loudly because something has gone very, very right to get to that point.
That's good, and it plays nicely to your point that the status quo isn't always at the right balance point, but the hypocrisy is off-putting.
The airline industry provides an extreme example. They go years at a time with no fatalities, while still providing almost ludicrously cheap service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoned_candy_myths
I would date my understanding of the myth to be from 1980, informed by a friend's mum, so the myth was oral tradition by then, across the pond in the UK. So a handful of years after 1974 the meme had spread.
This had morphed into an 'only in America' story for those of us outside the U.S. - we believed this happened on a regular Halloween basis in America and was part of 'trick or treating' (itself more American than British). Imagine the image of 'gun mad' America harbouring such 'psychos' in the community, this was easy to do if you had never been to the U.S.
The idea of a razor blade in some type of sweet did do the rounds, again in the 'made in America' context, with the myth spreading verbally. As children adults would tell you but you took reassurance that there were no crazies like that where you lived, again, only in America.
Sweets given to you as a child could be of variable quality. Sweets with a clove in the middle do exist, I think at the time I would have preferred the razor blade option, cyanide would have tasted better. Sweets kept past their sell by date might not be too good either, old folks could hand you these and expect you to enjoy them. So 'trick or treat' was actually part of the deal with all sweets offered by neighbours and other people you were to meet. It was therefore imaginable for the American myth to be true.
As an outsider I never got the impression that this actually happened/happens in America, more that this is some strange fear American's have.
This would have been in the late 1980s. So, in my case, the fear did not come from the media, but from a personal experience.
So rather than saying, "this never happens, it's just a myth", we should be saying, "this can happen, and let's take steps to protect ourselves".
Anyone remember the Tylenol Poisonings[0]? That was real, inspired copycats, and led to tamper-resistant and tamper-evident packaging. Tragic, but at least we learned from the tragedy.
While it's true that not everyone is out to get you, at the same time it's foolish to think that no-one is out to get you.
"The Razer Blade in the Apple" by Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi concluded in 1985 that the threat of a halloween sadist had been greatly exaggerated from 1958 to 1983. https://www.jstor.org/stable/800777?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
We can't say it never happens. However, it happens so rarely that it's not worth worrying about.
Around 1972 or 73 on Halloween, some neighborhood kid found a razor blade in an apple. Turned out he'd inserted it himself as a prank.
A lot of things have much earlier roots than can be found with searches of documents.
No idea if he did it himself or not, but he never admitted it. It could easily have been some part of a toy that poked into it.
After school we went to his house and cut it to pieces with a knife in his kitchen. It was an exciting adventure, we were eager to see what might be inside. Never found anything, though I'm not sure what we were expecting to find.
We didn't eat it either. But it did freak me out enough as a kid that for awhile after I would check for candy wrapper breaches.
I'd love to do that for the younger kids in my neighborhood. But a lot of the slightly older kids that come to my door are awfully surly. They are trying to grab handfuls of candy from the bowl as you are trying to give them one, and they also steal anything else that happens to be on your front porch that night. I don't really want to deal with trying to give them something special.
Candy laced with bath salts poses risk this Halloween
http://www.wral.com/candy-laced-with-bath-salts-poses-risk-t...
In my experience, trying to do this results in anger.
In this particular case, the truth of the matter is that you really do have to trust strangers to be kind instead of randomly malicious. Instead of making an argument that the fear is unfounded, it would be more effective to make a case affirming the fearful person's trust in their community.
You can call this "affirming the emotional truth of what they're saying" if you want, and -- here's a part that took me years to learn -- you can do it without being dishonest.
For example, dialog between Them (T) / You (Y):
T: I don't think I'll let my kids trick or treat this year, what with all these sickos putting razor blades in chocolate bars, and weed in gummy bears, and did you hear about those AIDS-infected needles being left in coin return slots? There's all this danger around, it's just so awful, what a horrible place this world is, I mean what kind of person poisons children? [etc for 5 more minutes]
Y: Yeah definitely, I see what you mean - there are so many really crazy and evil people in the world. I mean with these shootings, and bombings, it's like we never get a minute to just rest and not be scared of something!
T: Right, exactly!
Y: I'm trying to remember though, what was the halloween candy thing? I mean I thought I heard something in the 80s about that but it went away, or was a hoax or something. Did something happen last year?
T: Well I can't remember but I mean the news was just saying a minute ago to look out for marijuana-laced gummy bears
Y: Yeah, weed candy would be pretty bad. I tried edibles once and got pretty fucked up, I mean, it wasn't really a pleasant experience. But then, some people really seem to like it. .... wait a minute, drugs are expensive. who wastes them on random kids? ... Did the newssay they found some somewhere, or just that it was a thing that could theoretically happen?
T:
Y: And the other "scary candy" stuff - do you know ifthere are any stats on how often this happens? I mean I 'm sure somebody did it at some point, because people are insane, right, but considering the way idiots drive, I wouldn't be surprised if kids have a higher chance of getting picked off by a bad driver, than killer candy. Which is scary too of course, but I mean, we're already living with that, and don't keep them inside.
Actually come to think of it ... I can't think of a single case I've ever heard of where an actual specific kid got hurt from poisoned candy. Maybe there are a bunch of em but it's kind of weird that we wouldn't have at least some detail - was it a boy or a girl, where in the country, how old etc? I mean it would have to be all over the news if it happened, so I wonder if this is just one of those cases where the media likes to scare the shit out of everyone all the time to get attention?
T: I don't know, it still seems dangers
Y: Yeah, I mean, we should all take reasonable precautions in the world and stuff, but ... tell you what, let's google for reports of poisoned candy from last year and if it's really low, then figure we probably have better odds than from bad drivers, and let the kids have their fun?
T: ok
[off to google you go, snopes is first-ish hit followed by other less entry-level but more-authoritative sources, and pretty soon they're coming around]
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It certainly doesn't work that way every time, or even most times, but it can. And this has applications far beyond halloween candy. (Dungeons and Dragons. Immigration. Drug legalization. Rock music. Video games.) The person probably isn't insane; they probably heard a bunch of scary stuff, and got scared. Telling them "don't be scared" isn't going to help, but joining them on their side of the fence, then guiding toward a different outcome (which may not change their initial thought much but may help them change their behavior, which gives them more data on safety/etc with which to update their mental model for future use) can be pretty effective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy -- Though DBT was developed to treat BPD (see link for more), the recommendations for learning/teaching emotional coping skills seem to generalize well to many other kinds of emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to a given stimulus.
Would you mind suggesting an alternative opener, that would also work, that isn’t “slimy”?
My wife and I just went through our first session of counseling. The first instructions we received were to begin doing exactly this - before sharing our opinion or feelings, first acknowledge the feelings or statement of the other person, making sure that they feel heard.
Sure, sociopaths can use a similar tactic to manipulate others. Intent matters here.
Have you happened to speak to someone before and felt like they didn't actually listen to you?
You aren't saying "you're right to feel this way given the state of the world." You are saying "you're right to feel this way, given your specific priors." (And then, now that you are On Their Side, you go on to help them reevaluate the priors.)
The natural instinct for many of us is to start by disproving the other person's priors in order to demonstrate that their anxiety is unnecessary in hopes of reducing it. What I'm saying is that if you start by validating the emotional experience given their priors, you give their brain the space to back off from its fight-or-flight state and get into a position where it's capable of listening to your rational argument about why the alleged risk is likely overblown.
You don't have to sacrifice any truth value in doing this (instead of saying: "you're wrong to feel this way because your assumption is wrong", you are effectively saying "you are right to feel this way given your assumptions ... but btw, have you taken a hard look at those assumptions lately? Let's do that."). You're also framing it in a much more collaborative way - not "you are wrong and I will prove it and WIN", but "look our mutual goal is figuring out what Reality looks like, so let me stand over here with you and let's look at it together and try to figure out what we can see."
I'm making this point again because I myself struggled for years with this concept. I care about truth; honesty is important, etc. But if your goal is to get more people to see Reality As It Is, consider a strategy that starts by getting their mind into a more rational state, rather than assuming that state already exists.
The donors are not forced to give you 'treats' every time. If you can't accept that, don't go out asking.