What’s in Your Bag, Frankenstein?
Halloween…a time when the ghouls, ghosts, and goblins come out to play, along with the neighborhood kids who all desire one thing…collecting and eating as much candy as humanly possible. It’s a holiday loved across the country. Kids get to dress up like their favorite characters and adults get an excuse to wear completely inappropriate costumes, all in the name of having fun. As children ring doorbell after doorbell with their mouths salivating at the thought of “fun size” candy bars, some treats are more of a trick in some parts of the country…especially those where marijuana has been legalized.
Marijuana edibles were a creative concoction early in the days of legal weed. It gave people the option to eat their dose of THC rather than smoking marijuana buds, since smoking carries various health risks. The edibles created were super potent and got you high. Regulations were lax on how much THC could be infused in a product with some accidentally consuming far too much, winding up in the emergency room.
These edibles came in the forms of candy bars, lollipops, Sour Patch Kids, and gummy bears and to the uneducated eye, looked like a normal, benign piece of candy, yet they are full of a psychoactive drug. Unfortunately, because they look similar to normal candy, children have inadvertently gotten their hands on them. Colorado is one of the most notorious states when it comes to the weed game and seems to make most of the headlines. Since the creation of these edibles, parents state-wide have continued to be concerned about these “candies” accidentally winding up in their kids trick-or-treat bags each Halloween season. I don’t think most people would intentionally give a child a strong marijuana edible but because they can appear as common candy, it’s not far-fetched to think they could wind up in your kid’s candy bag.
On October 1st of this year, a ban was put in place in Colorado which no longer allows marijuana edibles manufacturers to make them in the form of gummy bears, fruit snacks, or other shapes that may be accidentally given to a child. Retailers were required to remove any banned shapes from their store shelves by October 1st. New labeling requirements have been enacted that require potency labeling of every edible and no single edible can exceed 100mg of THC in total, with no single dose greater than 10mg.
I think this ban is a good decision because of the amount of kids who have either been accidentally dosed with THC or knowingly stole them from their parents and brought them to school, passed them around to their friends, with the teachers and faculty being none the wiser. Halloween is supposed to be a time of fun and play and yes, eating tons of candy. I hope that this ban can let some parents breathe a bit easier, knowing that their kids may now be less likely to be tricked, when all they want is a treat.
