The Halloween Scare That Won’t Go Away

Every October, Joel Best starts getting calls from journalists, and he knows exactly what they want to talk about: candy. Specifically, they want to discuss the stubborn fear that bad actors might tamper with children’s trick-or-treat stashes by lacing candy with razors or fentanyl. Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, has researched this recurring plot for decades and has never found any evidence that a child has been killed or seriously injured via Halloween-candy tampering. (The only death-by-Halloween haul he is aware of is an incident where a parent intentionally murdered their child with a poisoned batch—“but I don’t count that,” he told me.)

[Read: You must respect candy corn]

Best has spent 40 years trying to debunk this belief, and this year has been a particularly busy one, given the panic around rainbow-colored fentanyl (to which