Strange Danger

Pot Candy? Don't Let the Media's Fear Mongering Ruin Halloween

The media loves fear. It's their bread and butter. They've spent decades trying to convince us that the bogyman is around every corner. They continue the endless parade of criminal horror stories, while crime rates plummet. They warn us not to lose sight of our children, lest they be snatched by some stranger, when it's far more likely that they'll be taken by somebody they know. I'd call it a conspiracy if their motives weren't so obvious. It's all about the ratings of course. People in our society (especially adults) eat that crap up.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when Halloween comes around. Every year they have to push some new imaginary threat to our children. “Keep your black cats inside folks" they say "and inspect every piece of candy. Everybody knows that there's sickos out there that will poison your children!” Because your neighborhood is just lousy with murderers who want to kill your kids. Is that it?

I don't buy it.

The latest media charade involves the Denver Police warning the public about the dangers of “pot infused” candy. Initially their concerns sound legitimate.

"This is highly deceptive," she said. "Why do regulators and elected officials in Colorado think that everyday candy loaded with marijuana somehow won't appeal to our kids?"

Activists and the police say the main risk to children at Halloween is that they may stumble across pot edibles by accident and mistake them for regular candy, not that they will have been given them maliciously while out trick-or-treating.

"Some of these products look so similar to candy that's been on the market and which we've eaten as children, there's really no way for a child or a parent, or even an expert in the field, to tell," said Patrick Johnson of Urban Dispensary, a Denver marijuana outlet, in the police video.

However, there has only been a handful of kids who have accidentally eaten pot since Colorado legalized marijuana. The Denver Post made a big deal out of the increasing number of kids who were admitted to the hospital for eating pot candy. Apparently, this year the number of kids is set to double last years record of, wait for it...8 kids. No deaths have been reported either. It's terrible that such a thing could happen, but that's still a pretty marginal number.

Of course the Denver Police department went on to give parents the usual spiel of “make sure to check every piece of candy, and don't let your kids have anything that looks like it's been tampered with”. Because as we all know, stoners just love giving away their pot for free, and they wake up every morning thinking of new ways to poison the neighborhood kids.

Give me a break.

If you're not in the know, allow me drop a bombshell on you. Not once, in the history of trick-or-treating, has a child been killed from eating candy that they received from a stranger. There's been a mere handful of attempted cases that amounted to nothing, over the past 50 years. Again, no deaths have ever been verified. There's been several claims of deaths, but these usually end up being an accident that the parents try to cover up, or in one case, a father who poisoned his own children. The razors in the apple, the broken glass, the rat poison candy... it's all a myth.

It's kind of amazing when you think about it. After decades of Halloween celebrations, and tens of millions of children saying trick or trick, billions of times, no one has ever died from poison candy. You'd think it would be attempted more by often by crazy people, after the media spent so many years putting the notion into everyone's head, but not so.

And yet, most people have given into the fear. Trick-or-treating has started to fall by the wayside, as helicopter parents coddle their kids. People are beginning to do prearranged Halloween events at churches, malls and parking lots, rather than going door to door. They're so afraid that something will happen to their children, but it's no more dangerous now than it was when they were kids.

The parents aren't content to follow their kids around when they go trick or treating. No, that's not safe enough. They must organize a perfectly safe and sterile environment for their children to play in. Unless you live in a crime ridden neighborhood, I can't imagine why you'd hover over your kids like that.

We've become such a soft and scared society. We're afraid of our own shadows, and we're spreading that fear to our children. No wonder we live in a society where CPS can threaten a parent with having their kids taken away, because they were playing unsupervised. No wonder we've let the authorities take so many of our freedoms away. We beg for safety at the slightest threat. At the core, we're a society that thrives on fear, and we've become a shell of our former selves. Instead of exposing our children to the community they live in, we shut them away. Instead of teaching them how to talk to strangers, we teach them to hide.

At some point the adults of our society, stopped being adults. Instead of telling their children that there was nothing hiding under the bed, they became just as afraid as their children.

So this Halloween don't give in to the fear mongering. It's been going on for far too long. Granted, Halloween is supposed to be a scary holiday, but we're afraid of all the wrong things. The threat of poison candy should not scare you. Don't go looking for it, because you're not going to find any.

What should really keep you up at night, is how far our nation has fallen into the depths of fear, and how often we beg to to be protected from so many imagined bogymen.

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