Legal Research

Just in time for Halloween ? No Child Poisoned by Halloween Candy. Ever.

By Pamela

Remember when Halloween was an adult-free zone?  The neighborhood teemed with costumed children, racing against the clock to collect free treats from their kindly neighbors.  I do.  That was my childhood, not necessarily that of my own children.  In the last several decades, parents have been subjected to a steady drumbeat of warnings about all kinds of awful things (poisoning, molestation, kidnapping, murder) that could happen on All Hallows Eve.  And we believed the warnings, even if that meant that our lovely neighbors were just monsters in disguise.  A recent Wall Street Journal column highlights studies, by Dr. Joel Best of the University of Maryland and by Dr. Elizabeth  Letourneau of the Medical University of South Carolina, that attempt to drive a wooden stake into the heart of this vampire.

Dr. Best’s work is cited by Snopes.com here: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/halloween.asp and Dr. Letourneau’s study is here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19581428.

[PRM]

Full post as published by Cocky Law Blawg on October 28, 2010 (boomark / email).