Monday, May 12, 2008
Are the stories about trick-or-treat mayhem for real?
Oct 29, 1999 | The other day, my kids came home from school with a burning question about trick or treating. "Should we throw away all the Pixie Sticks?" they asked. "Drug dealers put crack cocaine in them and then hand them out to kids."
Pixie Sticks are those striped paper straw things loaded with neon-colored sugar that stains the mouth and teeth. They happen to be one of my candidates for "Candy Scourge of the Decade" and I appreciate any opportunity to chuck them. But crack? It didn't make sense, not even to me, and when it comes to my kids, I'm usually willing to see the monster beneath the bed. But in this case, I figured that most drug dealers have enough repeat customers without spiking the candy of suburban kids.
"It's a myth," I told them. "Like the lady who dried her poodle in the microwave."
They nodded knowingly. "But we should still check all the candy, right?"
Right.
This is Halloween, America's national holiday of parental terror. Sure, most of us grown-ups have stopped believing in ghosts; we are unmoved by spooky stories and glowing jack-o'-lanterns with demonic grins. But we do not greet this holiday with grown-up complacency. We are afraid -- of Halloween weirdos, poisoned food, razors and kidnappers and child-torturing delinquents.
So tradition demands that we offer a few words of warning before sending our princesses and pirates into the dark. The short list:
I add my own voice to the chorus, dripping with gloom and doom, a voice suited to one of those gaunt, hollow-eyed women carrying a sign: "Beware! The End is Near!" And the bad, bad world isn't bad enough. We must also harangue about tooth decay and stomach aches and righteously hand out tiny boxes of raisins, health food treats, stickers, pencils, even toothbrushes. A trick for a treat.
How did we get this way? How did Halloween get this way? Every holiday has its personalized disaster scenario, the thumb on the bacchanal. Christmas has the tree that goes up in flames and burns down a house. Thanksgiving has the undercooked turkey that sends three generations to the hospital. We know these things have happened and yet we don't approach these holidays with paralyzing fear. Why does so much impending ruin, so much parental anxiety get dumped into Halloween's glow-in-the-dark basket?
Certainly not because anything bad has ever happened on Halloween. Just ask Joel Best, a sociologist from the University of Delaware who has a special interest in deviant behavior and refers to himself as "the world's leading expert on Halloween crime." To earn his title, Best scanned major newspapers between 1958 and 1998 for stories about blades in apples and poisoned Milk Duds. Then he analyzed about a hundred articles and followed up with phone calls to police and hospitals. Best concluded that the grand total of all the kids who have been critically injured by horrible Halloween deeds is ... zero.
"I haven't been able to find any evidence that a kid has ever been killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat received while trick-or-treating," he says. "I can't say that it has never happened, but to say that it happens a lot, that it happens all the time, that it justifies all the worrying and warnings? That's overblown. There's just no evidence."
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