On Aug. 30, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency identified a new danger to America’s kids: rainbow fentanyl. According to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, brightly colored fentanyl pills are “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults.”

This led to Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer warning that rainbow fentanyl could be distributed to children this Halloween to get them hooked on opioids. Scary stuff! But it’s a bunch of bullshit.

There are brightly colored fentanyl products out there, but there’s no logical reason to think anyone is going to purposefully hand it out on Halloween. Drug dealers are, by-and-large, trying to make money and stay out of jail. Passing out fentanyl disguised as candy to random kids on Halloween would not only cost the dealers money, it would lead to a swift arrest and a long sentence. It just doesn’t make sense, but government agencies and politicians ginning up drug hysteria to fund border protection efforts and ensure more money to fight opioids is logically consistent, however.

Concern over kids being given LSD for Halloween is a close analogy to the current rainbow fentanyl hysteria. Both drugs are extremely potent in small amounts, and the Halloween-specific fear comes partly from how the drugs are presented. In the case of LSD, acid-dealers sold sheets that were sometimes printed with cartoon characters. This led to the fear that these crazed acid-heads would hand them out on Halloween, and kids would think they were fake tattoos or stickers and stick them to their skin. There’s no solid evidence that this has ever happened, but the rumor pops up just about every year anyway.

There is a possible exception, but it’s shaky. In 2013, a woman in Salinas, Calif. was hospitalized after eating a Halloween candy bar she believed was laced with LSD. The presence of LSD wasn’t confirmed, no arrests were made, and there was no follow-up news story posted. Charitably, this report is unconfirmed.

The idea of a crazed poisoner taking out random kids on Halloween is terrifying, and seems somewhat plausible: After all, people have randomly killed strangers with poison. But there are no reports of anyone, ever, being poisoned by a stranger handing out Halloween candy. There are a couple of cases that are close, though.

Ronald Clark O’Bryan, aka “The Candy Man,” is the likely source for most Halloween hysteria. In 1974, Clark’s 8-year-old son Timothy died of cyanide poisoning soon after consuming a Pixy Stix on Halloween. Clark told police the Pixy Stix came from a house they’d visited while trick-or-treating. The investigation quickly ruled out the owner of the house and revealed that Clark had killed his own son to collect on the child’s life insurance. To cover up the crime, Clark gave poisoned candies to four other children. Miraculously, none of them consumed the powder.

The second case of a Halloween near-poisoning happened in 1964 on Long Island, N.Y. Helen Pfeil, a housewife, felt that some trick-or-treaters were too old for the holiday, so she handed out packages containing “ant buttons, steel wool pads, and dog biscuits” to older kids. She said it was a joke, but ant buttons contain arsenic, so no one else thought it was funny. The ant buttons were clearly marked “poison,” so they weren’t disguised as candy, and Pfeil said she told recipients of her special packages that they were meant as a joke, so it looks more like horrifically bad judgement than malice.

A person could easily slide a razor blade into a Halloween apple and you’d never know it until you took a bite. The visceral reaction everyone has upon picturing the scenario is the likely cause for this flavor of Halloween hysteria, but it’s a nearly unfounded fear. The hysteria itself is the cause of the handful of reports of kids finding razors and other nastiness in their candy—kids hear these stories, then stick a razor in an apple and show it to their parents to freak them out. There are some recent reports of finding razors in candy—including one of a kid who reportedly bit into a piece of candy with a blade in it— but there is no follow-up information on any of these stories. Judging by past reports of these kind, it’s likely that they are hoaxes.

Heroin is very expensive, highly sought-after, and difficult to obtain—no one is going to give it away to anyone, let alone random children—but it’s still listed among drugs to look out for in Halloween candy.

Heroin was the culprit in an actual Halloween candy death, though. In 1970, five-year-old Kevin Toston died of a heroin overdose. His parents reported that he’d eaten Halloween candy sprinkled with the drug, but they recanted their story days later. Kevin had actually eaten a capsule of heroin he’d found at his uncle’s house. The parents lied to protect the uncle.

Of all the harmful things that could end up in a kid’s Halloween candy haul, weed, edibles, or THC laced gummies make the most sense to me. It’s a common drug, and edibles can look exactly like candy, so some lunkhead could mistakenly hand them out. It’s happened before, too. In 2000, at least nine trick-or-treaters in Hercules, Calif. were given bags of marijuana covered in Snickers bar wrappers.

Police quickly tracked the weed down to a local homeowner, and discovered he had given the weed out accidentally. He was a postal worker, and had picked up the Snickers bars from the dead letter office, then gave them out to trick-or-treaters with no idea he was handing out weed.

The weed was not given out on purpose, and would never have been mistaken for candy once the wrapper was taken off, so this doesn’t fit the definition of a Halloween candy given intentionally to unsuspecting kids.

Fear that some stranger will hand your child laxatives instead of candy isn’t as common as other permutations of Halloween hysteria, but it should be, because it happened—one of the only two actual cases of someone intentionally harming trick-or-treaters involved a crank giving out Halloween laxatives.

Back in 1959, Willliam V. Shyne, a dentist from Fremont, Calif., gave out over 450 candy-coated laxatives—specifically, aloe pills—to children. Thirty kids got sick, although none seriously. Shyne was ultimately found guilty of “outraging public decency,” and was given a four-month suspended jail sentence, two years probation, and was fined $525.

The case received some press at the time, but Shyne seems to have never told anyone publicly why he put laxatives in kid’s candy. Maybe he had an issue with tooth decay or something?

While there are sporadic reports of people finding needles in their candy, like the razor blades, they are all either lacking any follow-up or are hoaxes—like this kid who did it for the TikTok views—but there is for one case.

In 2000, 49-year-old Minneapolis man James Joseph Smith was charged with one count of “adulterating a substance with intent to cause death, harm or illness.” He had slid needles into Snickers bars and handed them out on Halloween. One child was pricked by a needle, but the injury was minor. Smith was ultimately deemed incompetent to stand trial and was reportedly institutionalized.

For many christians, “Should we let our children celebrate Halloween?” is a divisive question. Some feel that the holiday is pagan or satanic, some seem more like, “Trick-or-treating is fine. Let’s just chill out, OK?”, and some try to walk a middle path by injecting Christianity into the day by replacing it with something called “Jesusween.” Spooky!

I can’t say for certain whether or not celebrating Halloween will welcome the Lord of Darkness into you and your child’s life, but I’d bet heavily that it won’t—every Halloween I try to summon the Dark Lord by dressing my child up like a ghost and bringing him to the neighbors houses to beg for candy, but I only end up with a bag full of sweets. Rip-off.