Every year you can count on an outlet posting an article about how either a law enforcement agency or advocacy group is pushing the idea that your neighbors just wanna see your kids suffer by giving them tainted Halloween candy.
This year it starts with an article out of Pennsylvania.
“A police department in Pennsylvania is urging parents to be extra cautious with their Halloween candy this year. Police in the city of Johnstown warned parents to inspect any candy they buy to make sure it doesn’t contain THC, the primary active ingredient in marijuana… The warning came after authorities issued a search warrant and found Nerds Rope candy that had 400 mg of THC per rope, according to police. Recreational weed is still illegal in Pennsylvania and Ferrara Candy Company, which distributes Nerds, said the product was counterfeit.”
First, let’s not downplay the seriousness of counterfeit products in the marketplace. The nerds company is not making edibles and anything that isn’t coming from a trusted source with their own verifiable name or brand should be a no go. You just don’t know what you’re putting in your system and it’s a gamble as an adult to even consume that.
Second, nobody is going to be giving out what amounts to being “their stash” to a bunch of kids on Halloween. Nobody is going to confuse a $4.88 bag of Kit Kat fun size bars with their cannabis edibles. That price difference alone is a big motivator in that arena.
It harks back to the days when D.A.R.E. used to tell kids that you never know who may be lacing cannabis with PCP or cocaine, knowing that no drug dealer is going to sell you a $15/gram dollar drug for $15 -$20 if they it coated with a $100 /gram drug. They would be the worst drug dealers in the math and financial department ever. Maybe if it was in a well to do off neighborhood would you possible find somebody with enough money to blow on edibles to hand out to everybody but themselves.
The real kicker in that article is the following,
“Yet one expert, who has been researching the phenomenon of “tainted” Halloween candy — an issue he said that pops every couple of years — told ABC News he’s never seen a credible threat in his 40 years of research.
“I’ve never found any evidence that anybody has been seriously hurt this way,” Joel Best, who also works as a University of Delaware professor, told ABC News. “I don’t think there’s any danger.”
It just doesn’t happen. If it does it is more than likely somebody the family knows and is close to. This myth of people tainting the Halloween candy at large needs to be put to rest. If you’re going to check your child’s candy for anything, do it to make sure they’re not eating something they are allergic to, or open candy that has just gotten plain filthy and unsafe from random foreign contaminants.