Poisoned Halloween Candy?!
By Cia
Since this month's theme was Candy and Poison, naturally, I immediately went off to google 'candy and poison'. Because I'm original like that.
What I found, however, was less than fun and frankly, vaguely horrifying.
As I scrolled through Google after searching the theme, the titles of the articles all said something like this:
"Tainted Halloween Candy"
"A Brief History of Sick People Tampering With Halloween Candy ..."
"Poisoned Halloween Candy"
"People Putting Razor Blades, Needles and Poison in Halloween Candy"
...That was obviously unexpected.
I quickly found out a lot of information about poisoned Halloween candy - and there seem to be a lot of cases about it.
In 1970. Kevin Toston lapsed into a coma because of a heroin overdose just two days after Halloween, dying four more days later.
Helen Pfeil, a housewife from Greenlawn, New York handed out arsenic-laced ant poison buttons to unsuspecting trick-or-treaters on Halloween in 1964.
Traces of strychnine were found in a box of Sunkist Fun Fruits Dinosaurs in a New Jersey grocery just before Halloween.
After Halloween 1994, a three-year-old child living in New Britain, Connecticut was diagnosed to have been suffering from cocaine poisoning.
A youth living in Redford became ill and his doctor went public with charges of cyanide poisoning and doctored Halloween candy.
In Washington, DC in 1991, 31-year-old Kevin Michael Cherry of Montgomery County coincidentally died of heart failure after eating some of his child's Halloween loot.
Ariel Katz, a 7-year-old Santa Monica girl died on 31 October 1990 while trick-or-treating.
In 2001, four-year-old Tiffaney Troung of Vancouver died a day after ingesting candy she picked up trick-or-treating on Halloween.
Eight-year-old Timothy O 'Bryan from Texas died from eating cyanide-laced Pixy Stix which he got trick-or-treating in 1974.
So...maybe next time you go trick-or-treating during Halloween, you might want to get your sweets examined for poison before you actually eat them, lest you get poisoned by a random psychopath in your neighborhood.
In your neighborhood too. Doesn't that make it much worse?
BUT WAIT -
I might have misread the articles I've found.
Yes. Apparently, most of the 'poisoned candy cases' had actually nothing with the Halloween candy. They were usually just self-evident Halloween jokes.
Very funny. I was so scared I almost swore never to eat any sweets ever again, which would have been a HUGE mistake.
It seems that young Kevin Toston had accidentally found his uncle's secret heroin stash and poisoned himself, and his family had sprinkled heroin on his candy to protect the uncle. What a wonderful family he must have had.
Helen Pfeil just wanted to scare away the trick-or-treating teenagers who she deemed 'too old'. The suspicious powder in the box of Sunkist Fun Fruits Dinosaurs the State Police lab had initially labeled strychnine was retested by the Food and Drug Administration and pronounced corn starch. No traces of cocaine had been found on the leftover piece of candy that had supposedly poisoned the unnamed three-year-old. The Redtown youth's doctor had misread initial lab results. The father who had died after eating his child's Halloween candy had just coincidentally had a heart attack. Ariel Katz had died of congenital heart failure. The cause of Tiffaney Troung's death was ultimately pegged as non-contagious sepsis-causing streptococcus bacteria, not poisoned Halloween candy.
HOWEVER -
Timothy O' Bryan was poisoned by his own father, who slipped poisoned candy into the kid's Halloween stash. So you should actually watch out in case you dad tries to poison you. No offense.
And here ends this month's article on the topic of poisoned Halloween candy. I hope you had fun reading it and gained some insight about keeping your candy safe from poison the mentioned topic.
Ciao!
~Cia