Time to revisit an old topic, but one that gets brought up year after year when talking with family and friends:
There has never been a random Halloween candy poisoning in the US.
There have been cases of parents murdering their own children by poisoning candy, a homeowner accidentally handing out marijuana in Snickers wrappers because he decided to use candy that showed up where he worked at the dead letter office, a child putting ant poison on his own Snickers bar to freak out his parents, children finding stashes of drugs and dying from an overdose with relatives sprinkling the drugs on Halloween candy to try to protect the abuser, and other incidents. No random poisonings, ever. But, this Halloween, your kids are not going to get poisoned by some random person in your neighborhood handing out poisoned candy.
Next up: foreign objects inserted into candy. There is a small chance — less than the risk of your child dying from choking on a piece of broccoli — that there may be a needle, razor, or other foreign object inserted into candy. Your kid might get a poke or a cut. There have only been 80 incidences of foreign objects found in Halloween treats in the USA since 1959; 70 of them were hoaxes perpetuated by the “victim” or immediate family.
My question with all of this is: why the obsession? My parents made a huge deal out of this when I was a kid, counseling me to cut up apples and discard suspicious-looking candy (no matter how good that smooshed-up Snickers looked in the bottom of the bag). Could it be that, even though most of us know this is a hoax, we instinctively feel some need to instill in our children a distrust of free gifts from neighbors?