It was very strange to be completing research on this topic on the afternoon of Halloween

preparing for a parade of kids and costumes and their parents to be stopping by our house.

The overwhelming majority of them, total strangers, to take some of whatever candy we wanted to give them, and then

head home and eat it.

All these people, trusting that we didn't, I don't know, fill a syringe full of some highly

lethal odorless and tasteless poison,

inject that through the packaging into all the candy bars they're grabbing or at least into some of them.

This episode freaked me out a little bit.

We are all constantly just trusting, whether we think about it consciously

or not, that some random psycho hasn't poisoned the fruit we grab at the store, the vitamins

that show up in the mail, the hamburger we pick up at the drive-thru. the

hamburger we pick up at the drive-thru, the bottle of Tylenol, we grab at the drugstore.

If you like me, you don't really think about this possibility because it feels like,

yeah, but who would do that?

Not many would. It almost never happens. Almost never.

But it did happen in Chicago in the fall of 1982. Back when some dirt bag, or perhaps a couple dirt bags,

but probably just one dirt bag, decided to have anyone living in the Chicago area who bought

a bottle of Tylenol, unwillingly play a little Russian roulette,

not knowing that some of the capsules in the bottle had been poisoned.

On September 29th, 1982,

seven people in the Chicago area died shortly after ingesting Tylenol capsules

poison with highly lethal potassium cyanide.

...