Why people are freaking out about marijuana candy

Although the legalization of marijuana is largely going better than expected in Colorado, it’s now clear that there is one major hitch facing the state’s burgeoning pot industry: marijuana edibles.

On October 13, the Denver Police Department issued a warning to parents to watch out for any marijuana-laced goods in their kids’ trick-or-treat bags. Although there’s no evidence yet that someone is planning to mix marijuana candy with real candy, the warnings have left some parents worried.

In another controversy, Hershey sued TinctureBelle, a small marijuana edibles company based in Colorado, because the company’s pot-laced goods allegedly imitated the famous chocolate company’s products. On October 16, the Denver Post reported that Hershey and the small marijuana edibles company had quietly reached a settlement in late September.

By themselves, the lawsuit and Halloween candy scares might not seem like a big deal. But they’re only the latest in a series of issues that have mired the marijuana edibles market since Colorado’s retail sales in January. As other states begin to push for legalization, these problems may act as the first serious problem in how, exactly, pot should be regulated once it’s legalized.

The Hershey lawsuit touches on another major issue with marijuana edibles: how the products are marketed.

There are, of course, the trademark and branding concerns that Hershey is legitimately worried about. The Hashees, Ganja Joy, Hasheath, and Dabby Patty products look a lot like Hershey products Reese’s, Almond Joy, Heath, and York peppermint candies, respectively.

But the bigger concern for legalization skeptics and critics is that these products imitate candies that are marketed to children. Critics worry that, even with the green stamp that marks marijuana products, younger children might not be able to tell that the Hashees package is, in fact, not a Reese’s.

Under current laws and regulations, there are strict limits to how products like tobacco and alcohol can be marketed. This is largely done to make sure neither drug is marketed to children. Marijuana is nowhere near as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco, but it’s still a drug — and many people would like to see it regulated as such.

Now, there are some protections already in place for children. Ron Kammerzell, director of enforcement at the Colorado Department of Revenue, previously said the state enforces regulations that ensure packages are child-proof and child-resistant. In July, the state passed regulations making it easier to tell how much THC, the active ingredient of pot, is in edible products. The concern is whether the current regulations are enough.

On October 13, the Denver Police Department posted a video warning parents that some trick-or-treat candy could be laced with marijuana. Following the warning, CNN published a piece raising the alarm about marijuana-laced Halloween candy.

Fears of poisoned candy have long been a part of the Halloween season, even though there’s no to back up the concerns.

LiveScience reported on why the fears are rooted in myth:

Researchers such as Joel Best of University of Delaware, who followed up on nearly 100 stories of candy contamination, have found that such claims almost always turn out to be tall tales, often told by the children themselves. Best published his results in “Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern About Child-Victims” (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

It really is a myth that, every October, “strangers are getting ready to poison the candy,” said Aaron Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University and co-author of “Don’t Swallow Your Gum! Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies about Your Body and Health” (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009). As for all the warnings, “they are, to some extent, fear-mongering,” Carroll told LiveScience.

There has been exactly one documented case of a child being directly poisoned by Halloween candy, Carroll said. In 1974, an 8-year-old died after sucking on a Pixy Stix laced with cyanide. But the poisoner was not some mysterious Grim Reaper posing as a harmless neighbor. Nope, it was good ol’ Dad.

In another case, a 5-year-old decided to try his uncle’s heroin, and with no one around to give him pointers, he overdosed and died. The family then sprinkled heroin into the child’s Halloween candy stash, in hopes of using the candy myth to cover their own negligence.

What about razor blades lurking within nougat? Pins in chocolate? Syringes?

Nope. Nope. And nope.

The Cannabist’s Brittany Driver argued there’s some reason to be concerned with marijuana-laced candy in particular. “In many situations, it really is difficult to tell the difference between a treat and an infused treat,” she wrote. “The Denver Police’s video includes side-by-side images of THC-infused candy next to the original candy they resemble to allow viewers to judge for themselves.”

But this can be easily avoided if parents, as the Denver Police recommended, check their children’s candy for tampering, as Driver acknowledged: “The question that begs to be answered here is this, ‘Do I need to worry about my kid getting pot-infused edibles from some psycho this Halloween?’ I say, if you do your due diligence, the chances of that happening are minuscule to none.”

The other big concern: It’s a lot easier to get too high on edibles than it is through other forms of consumption, such as smoking or vaping.

When marijuana is smoked or vaped, it works through the lungs and into the blood stream within a few minutes. When marijuana is eaten, it can take one to three hours for it to work through the stomach and into the blood stream.

A pot smoker just needs to wait a few minutes to realize if he’s getting as stoned as he wants. To increase the dose, he can take a few puffs from a joint and wait a few minutes to see the full effects.

An edibles consumer, on the other hand, might notice the effects aren’t kicking in as quickly as desired, try eating more, and end up eating way too much long before he even realizes he’s high. By the time the effects kick in, the high could very well be overwhelming and downright uncomfortable.

The issue is further complicated with how edibles are made and packaged in Colorado. A serving is 10 milligrams of THC, the psychoactive substance in marijuana, and a product can have up to 10 servings, or 100 milligrams. (For reference, 10 milligrams of THC is around what one should expect in a typical joint.)

But eating 10 percent of a 100-milligram candy bar doesn’t mean someone is getting 10 milligrams of THC. It’s possible, for instance, that the marijuana is poorly dispersed throughout the candy bar, and the one-tenth eaten by a user might actually contain much more or less marijuana than expected.

So even if someone is patient and aware of the serving sizes, it can still be very tricky to manage how much THC is taken in. Even Steve Horwitz, edible aficionado and owner of Ganja Gourmet in Denver, previously said he’s had some seriously bad trips after eating too much pot.

There have been a few tragedies involving marijuana edibles, although in many cases it’s still a matter of dispute just how much marijuana played a role.

1) A 19-year-old college student jumped to his death off a Denver hotel balcony. As reports later found, the student had consumed six times the recommended amount of a marijuana cookie.

2) Richard Kirk allegedly shot and killed his wife after he ate a pot-laced candy. But police reported that Kirk also took prescription painkillers, which are explicitly not meant to be mixed with marijuana, alcohol, or any other substance, and they said the amount of marijuana in the candy was low. A judge later said that there was enough evidence to establish probable cause for first-degree murder, because, as CBS News reported, Kirk “had the wherewithal to remember the code to a locked gun safe and press the weapon to his wife’s head nearly 13 minutes into her call with the 911 dispatcher.”

3) New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported her own bizarre experience with marijuana edibles in a column in June. After eating far too much marijuana, Dowd reported feeling like she was actually dead during the terrible trip. “It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly,” she wrote. “The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.”

4) Children’s Hospital Colorado reported a so-called surge in children ending up in emergency rooms after eating marijuana. The increase, however, represented a tiny patient population: from eight cases in all of 2013 to nine through May 2014.

To some extent, the blame should also fall on bad parents. “Marijuana should be treated as any other drug or medicine and kept out of reach of children,” Melissa Vizcarra, spokesperson for Children’s Hospital Colorado, wrote in an email.

Even with these problems, marijuana is still much safer than other drugs. All of these stories, after all, can be repeated multiple times over for alcohol. While someone might seriously freak out or even have a terrible accident while under the influence of marijuana, that person is most likely not going to overdose to death. Alcohol, on the other hand, directly causes tens of thousands of deadly health problems each year.

There’s general support, even among legalization advocates like the Marijuana Policy Project, for better labeling and packaging on edible products. In Colorado, regulators approved stronger rules earlier this year to make the amount of marijuana present in the goods clearer. As other states, like Washington, set up their own rules for medical and recreational marijuana, they’re looking to Colorado’s experience to see what they should do as well.

Some drug policy experts, such as Mark Kleiman of UCLA, suggested the concerns could eventually blow over. “It may be in the long run that eating it is safer,” he said in September. The high “doesn’t come on as fast. And once you have a legal option, you know how much you’re taking.”