“He was in the bathroom convulsing, vomiting, and gasping and then suddenly he went limp.” “Thirty seconds after I left Tim’s room, I heard him cry to me, ‘Daddy, Daddy, my stomach hurts,’” Ronald later told reporters as he sobbed loudly. They both chose a large “Pixie Stix” they had received. Since there was a light rain falling, they only collected candy in a two-block area for half-an-hour before returning home.Īs he went to bed, Ronald agreed to let both of his children eat one piece of candy before they went to sleep. The meth came from his father, and police tests on his candy turned up zero drug traces.Ĭran Cowan “We thought it was meth, but it turned out to be a Jolly Rancher.On Halloween night, 1974, Ronald O’Bryan took his eight-year-old-son, Timothy, and his daughter, trick-or-treating with some other neighborhood friends near their home in the Deer Park suburb of Houston. In 2018, a five-year-old went to the hospital with meth in his system after trick-or-treating. Turned out he’d broken into his uncle’s heroin stash, unrelated to any candy he’d eaten. In 1970, a five-year-old kid in Detroit died from heroin after Halloween, and people suspected he’d got it from trick-or-treat candy. Here too, we have a case from the ’70s that seemed to follow the urban legend but turned out to be something else. No one is targeting elementary school kids to buy synthetic opioids, as elementary school kids don’t have much money. No one is giving drugs from their suburban porch on Halloween night, and no one is giving away expensive drugs for free. If traffickers are carrying disguised fentanyl, it’s to elude detection by law enforcement, not to fool children. No one is trying to give away drugs by disguising them as anything else. That would be a poor strategy and would eliminate repeat business (the reason traffickers add fentanyl to other drugs is because bulking them up saves money). No one is deliberately giving fatal drug doses to get customers addicted. and it’s only gotten worse as news stations repeated the claim. Interestingly, the prudent response back then was to eschew store-bought fare in favor of homemade stuff, while today, advice says you must avoid homemade candy at all costs and ensure the candy’s store-bought and sealed.Įvan-Amos/Wiki Commons Don’t eat Creepy Joe’s homemade malt balls. However, no one was maliciously trying to murder children, they were just making stuff as cheaply as they could. Food they bought often did contain impurities (in one famous case, arsenic slipped into a batch of peppermint candy, with fatal results). This one dates all the way back to the industrial revolution, when parents feared that food they bought sometimes contained impurities. The belief did have a predecessor, a slightly more rational one: the fear of tainted food in general. Hey, we didn’t say any of these explanations would make clear sense-this is an irrational belief we’re talking about here. Which fears? Crime in general was huge in the ’70s, true, but sociologists point to other factors that hurt people’s trust in one another in the ’60s and ’70s, everything from women entering the workforce to racial integration. The poison candy myth did not exaggerate one case into many but instead fed on unrelated fears. Scott Graham For more details, consult a financial advisor. It’s not a very good savings scheme, but a savings scheme is all it is-you should not go for it unless you’re in a position to put some savings away. You expect your child won’t die anytime soon, but insurance transfers money into an account that they can access in the future. Instead, child life insurance is actually a savings scheme. You (usually) aren’t seeking to replace lost income because children (usually) do not work. Life insurance is different for children. To a lesser extent, life insurance also pays for expenses that pop up when someone dies, including the funeral this applies more when you are confident the holder will die soon, like if they’re really old. That’s why a breadwinner takes out insurance on their own life with their family as the beneficiary, that’s why companies take out life insurance on their employees. Instead, life insurance seeks to replace income that you will lose when they die. You do not insure the lives of your loved ones simply because you love them and they are precious to you.
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