No, there won’t be any fentanyl in your kid’s Halloween candy.
Just like there won’t be any marijuana either.
Nor will there be razor blades lurking in candied apples.
Yes, these are preposterous myths that have spread over the years. Newspapers love these stories. Local news broadcasters salivate for these fever dreams even more than kids yearn for the actual candy. To its credit, in 2021, the New York Times published a piece that reviewed (i.e., threw under the bus, at long last) some of its own past credulous stories that had perpetuated a number of the more stupendously absurd Halloween candy myths that had no basis in reality.
It’s the perfect urban legend. Scary evil-doers seeking to harm our kids. Instead of chocolate…your kid will get…addicted to drugs! Or worse. (Just for fun, I looked at weekly poisoning deaths for kids over the years. Halloween week is completely unremarkable. I’m not even going to bother showing you the data. That’s how boring it is.)
As my colleague Dr. Ryan Marino said in a great interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company last year, the tainted candy myth has always been about moral panic. That ostensibly credible sources like the U.S. DEA perpetuate these myths—in the absence of any evidence that they’ve ever happened—is disappointing, if unsurprising (since they mistakenly think if you touch fentanyl you might just up and die. Spoiler: that’s also a myth. In fact, there’s probably fentanyl on most $100 bills in this country). Drumming up breathless fears about drug dealers running amok trying to poison our kids (or else, as Marino points out, attempting to make customers out of 10-year-olds, which would be quite an odd business model given that the target demographic in that little fantasy possesses no money) makes nobody safer, and removes joy from one of the few remaining fun communal kid traditions we have in this country.
One piece of good news. The internet is over it. A new meme took off this year. “Parents PLEASE check your child’s candy. My kid just found [fill in the blank with something kind of amusing].
Here’s my favorite one so far…
Happy Halloween!
No fentanyl. Maybe just potassium cyanide. Have you ever heard of Ronald Clark O'Bryan? The transcript of his trial is a bit long, but you might just want to skim the opinion of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals: O'Bryan v. State, 591 S.W.2d 464 (Tex.Cr. App.1979). I was working as Judge Douglas' research attorney when that case came down, and I remember it well. (I later worked for Judge W.C. Davis, the opinion's author.)
If all that seems too much like work, you could read the Wikipedia article on O'Bryan. It seems to have the salient facts right.
Oh my re: Shen Yun!! So funny! My daughter and I are haunted by "Shen Yun : A Must See!" billboards festooned all across Philadelphia over the years.