The Tainted Treats Myth Lives On
If you spend $5 on a marijuana lollypop, are you really going to give it out to the kiddies?
Unlikely.
This would serve what purpose, exactly? The joy of thinking, "I got some 5-year-old high?"
And frankly, as a kid, we weren't going to eat some weirdly wrapped off-brand candy. We wanted Snickers, the Hershey's Miniatures dark, etc.
Jacob Sullum writes at reason that the folk tale of people giving kids pot-laced candy lives on -- despite a lack of evidence that anybody actually does that:
Last week the DPD posted a video in which Patrick Johnson, proprietor of Denver's Urban Dispensary, warns that "there's really no way to tell the difference between candy that's infused and candy that's not infused" once the products have been removed from their original packages. The video illustrates Johnson's point with images of innocuous-looking gummy bears and gumdrops. He advises parents to inspect their kids' Halloween haul and discard anything that looks unfamiliar or seems to have been tampered with.Det. Aaron Kafer of the DPD's Marijuana Unit amplifies that message in an "Ask the Expert" podcast, saying "there's a ton of edible stuff that's out there on the market that's infused with marijuana that could be a big problem for your child." Noting that "all marijuana edibles have to be labeled," Kafer recommends that parents make sure their kids "avoid and not consume anything that is out of the package."
CNN turned these warnings into a widely carried story headlined "Tricks, Treats and THC Fears in Colorado." According to CNN, "Colorado parents have a new fear to factor in this Halloween: a very adult treat ending up in their kids' candy bags."
Actually, this fear is not so new. For years law enforcement officials have been warning parents to be on the lookout for marijuana edibles in their kids' trick-or-treat sacks. And for years, as far as I can tell, there has not been a single documented case in which someone has tried to get kids high by doling out THC-tainted treats disguised as ordinary candy. Since 1996, the year that California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use, the newspapers and wire services covered by the Nexis database have not carried any reports of such trickery, although they have carried more than a few articles in which people worry about the possibility.
After the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided a San Francisco manufacturer of marijuana edibles in September 2007, for instance, the agency claimed it was protecting children, especially the ones who dress up in costumes and go begging for candy on October 31. "Kids and parents need to be careful in case kids get ahold of this candy," said Javier Pena, special agent in charge of the DEA's San Francisco office. "Halloween is coming up." According to the Contra Costa Times, medical marijuana advocates "dismissed Pena's Halloween reference as an 'absurd' attempt at 'pure publicity.'"
Sullum notes:
There is a cost to such bogeyman stories, and it goes beyond needlessly discarded candy. These rumors portray the world as a darker, more dangerous place than it really is, which is probably not conducive to a happy childhood or a successful adulthood. At the same time, the credence that public officials lend to such fanciful fears makes any reasonably skeptical person doubt other warnings from the same authorities, an unfortunate result when those warnings happen to be accurate and useful.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
(And it's making your children high!
Before you know it, your daughter will be turning tricks on the street corner and your son will be making meth out of your shed!
P.S. Pot was plenty available growing up and it was plenty available before medical marijuana.
Yawnies.
and your son will be making meth out of your shed!
No need. Kids are prescribed Adderall and Ritalin already. Weird to think that kids are using amphetamines that are nearly identical to methamphetamine. Is that scary?
Anyway, the real drug is sugar. Isn't it about time we make the white stuff illegal? Let's get back to the good days when raisins, dates, oranges and roasted almonds were considered treats. Lol.
Jason S. at October 20, 2014 7:02 AM
So, don't eat anything not in its wrapper. General good advice. After all crazy lady Jenkins is 200 years old and those gummy bears may predate Coolidge.
Ben at October 20, 2014 7:18 AM
so the kernel of truth here, is that KIDS could potentially run out of candy to give out, and then give out some from mom's special bowl...
or mistake the candy they got with their parents special candy.
That part IS documented, and IS growing... but that's just the way kids are. They get into stuff, ESPECIALLY when it looks just like their own candy:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25807342/childrens-hospital-sees-surge-kids-accidentally-eating-marijuana
SwissArmyD at October 20, 2014 9:29 AM
Not sure irony's the word here, but one of the reasons I advocate ending the drug war is so Big Pharma can produce all the things people want to put into their bodies, thus ensuring a basic (I wouldn't expect more than that) level of QC.
DaveG at October 20, 2014 10:23 AM
This pearl-clutching over candy has been going on since I can remember. I'm 48, and our parents used to tell us not to eat anything until they'd checked it (although I suspect that was an excuse for my dad to ferret out all the good stuff). Back then it was razor blades.
Not one piece of candy ever failed to pass muster, so...non issue.
Daghain at October 20, 2014 10:45 AM
The razor blades are supposed to be hidden in the apples. Throw out the apples, eat the candy.
Andrew_M_Garland at October 20, 2014 2:42 PM
About 10 years ago, I had to instruct my mother (who hadn't handed out candy at Halloween in maybe a quarter-century, due in part to moving around a lot) that you don't give unwrapped candy to kids, such as candy corn. But, of course, there are tiny packages of that these days.
BTW, for those who don't know, the 1930s movie Reefer Madness was turned into a 1999 stage musical - and Thelma White, who had played a drug dealer in the movie, showed up at the theatre with her wheelchair and oxygen tank. (She was 89.)
More on that:
http://www.reefermadness.org/critics/hightimes.html
lenona at October 20, 2014 3:28 PM
She was on oxygen because as a younger woman she took pot.
Crid [CridComment at Gmail] at October 20, 2014 4:58 PM
Daghain,
I did have some candy fail the parent test. But for good reason. You know how chocolate goes white when it gets really really old. That sort of thing was the issue. No intentional tampering. But some of the grannies can't see that well and put out product well past the sell by decade.
Ben at October 21, 2014 7:01 AM
Ben, I could totally see that happening.
And lenona, Reefer Madness the musical is SPECTACULAR.
Daghain at October 21, 2014 5:16 PM
Daghain:
Good to know. Unfortunately, I somehow missed it in 2011 in Boston. Hope it comes back.
Oh, re Halloween in general - I found this Dear Abby column at Bratfree:
http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/2014/10/19/cheap-candy-might-work-magic-on
Unbelievable! What part of "crippled" or "Living on Social Security" does the (newish) Dear Abby not understand? Is she getting senile?
Some commentators (there are 700-plus comments) suggested that there was more to the story than the writer was letting on, since most neighborhoods have at least some non-participating houses on Halloween - and kids and teens usually respect that. However, I haven't seen anyone who AGREES with Abby's advice...
lenona at October 22, 2014 11:56 AM
Surprise! There's a TV-movie version from 2005! IT got 7.1 stars at the IMDb. Not bad!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404364/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1
The user reviews look great, too.
lenona at October 22, 2014 12:31 PM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2014/10/the-tainted-tre.html#comment-5308103">comment from lenonaMore to that story than is in the letter.
If Jeanne Phillips even writes Dear Abby, which I wonder about, there's one reason only that she has a column: Ann Landers had a column, her sister piggybacked on her idea and started one, too, back when that was easy and space in papers was vast, like midwestern cornfields.
People still read Dear Abby because they're read it in the past, to see human problems laid out on the page, and/or because they can't believe what idiotic and uninformed advice she sometimes gives.
Also, if you behave as a neighbor, and not in ugly ways, you can ask other neighbors to help you -- to guard your house, to look out for you, etc. If I had an elderly lady living nearby, I'd look out for her. As a matter of fact, there's an old guy who lives by me who moved in recently, and I adore him and I'm protective of him. Some jerk in his complex got aggressive with him and I told the older guy that if there's ever a problem, call me, email me, I'll always help him. (As it is, I email him when he leaves his car where he'll be ticketed for street cleaning, etc. It feels nice to be neighborly.)
Amy Alkon
at October 22, 2014 12:39 PM
Jason: "Kids are prescribed Adderall and Ritalin already. Weird to think that kids are using amphetamines that are nearly identical to methamphetamine."
Look up Desoxyn. It's the next thing a doctor will try if a kid reacts badly to Adderall and Ritalin, and it _is_ meth.
Sure, overuse of meth and other amphetamines is dangerous, but prohibition has created far greater dangers. When I was in college 40 years ago, it wasn't particularly difficult to get a prescription for amphetamines, and a good many of my classmates would use them to cram for finals. The worst effect most of them experienced: they'd forget what they learned by cramming instead of studying throughout the term nearly as fast as they'd learned it. That's true whether or not you use a chemical booster. Nearly all of them graduated, maybe grew up a little, and put aside the overly-powerful stimulants. A small percentage would continue to seek happiness through chemistry, and they became really f'd up - but the vast majority of those were drunks. And for most of them, I could see they were headed for trouble long before they became addicted to one thing or another. Drugs don't cause drug abuse, drug abusers do.
But now, instead of college students finagling the prescription system, you have high school dropouts doing chemistry in their kitchen. They can't keep the toxins they use in their poor substitutes for retorts. They have no way to properly dispose of the waste products. And quite often, they can't even separate the waste product from the meth. And of course, the drug warriors solution for the problems they caused with regulation is more regulation...
markm at October 27, 2014 7:20 PM
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