Halloween

Jacob Sullum | 10.31.2024 2:45 PM

When you put candy in bowls for trick-or-treaters tonight, remember that you might need nut-free options for kids with allergies. You also might also want to consider including gummies or lollipops for kids who don't eat chocolate. And don't forget: You must be careful not to accidentally mix your expensive marijuana edibles in with the cheap, less psychoactive bundles of sugary goodness you bought at Target or Walmart.

If you think that last reminder is not only gratuitous but also an insult to your intelligence, you are not alone. But this is the latest spin on perennial warnings about the supposed hazards of cannabis candy on Halloween, and it actually represents an improvement.

For nearly two decades, alarmist government officials, abetted by credulous reporters, have been warning parents prior to Halloween that malevolent strangers might try to get their kids high by passing off THC-infused treats as ordinary candy. These alerts are a version of the old urban legends about razor blades, needles, and glass shards hidden inside Halloween candy, and they are equally grounded in reality.

"We didn't find a single case of a person purposefully giving children marijuana edibles on Halloween in an attempt to harm them," Snopes writer Dan Evon reported in October 2021. That assessment is consistent with what I have found every time I have compared the breathless annual advisories about this purported danger to reports of actual cases. Those reports are almost always misrepresentations of qualitatively different phenomena, such as middle-schoolers who deliberately consumed marijuana gummies, Japanese candy in wrappers decorated with maple leaves that cops mistook for cannabis leaves, and a guy who "filled empty marijuana packets with [ordinary] gummy bears" after "he ran out of Halloween candy."

The incident that most closely resembles the scenario imagined by cops like Bureau County, Illinois, Sheriff James Reed (who erroneously claimed that Crunch Choco Bars made in Japan contained THC) happened two years ago in Canada. A Winnipeg couple, 63-year-old Sheldon Chochinov and 52-year-old Tammy Sigurdur, was accused of handing out marijuana edibles such as "THC infused Nerds candy" to trick-or-treaters, which they said was an honest mistake.

Last March, CBC News reported, Sigurdur "was sentenced to pay a total of $5,000 in fines as part of a joint recommendation accepted by a judge for her role in handing out the cannabis edibles." Here is how CBC News describes what happened: "Without her glasses on, Sigurdur filled plastic zipped sandwich bags with various candy and gum she found in the closet—not realizing about a dozen of the bags had edibles in them before she gave them to her husband to hand out at the door."

The dearth of cases in which people deliberately tried to dose children on Halloween has led to a noticeable change in warnings from law enforcement agencies, public health officials, and news outlets. They now typically emphasize the potential for accidental confusion, as opposed to malicious........

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