Trick-or-Treating...For Pot?

It seems that parents in Colorado might have to worry about more than sugar rushes this Halloween. Some Colorado parents are expressing concern about marijuana infused candy that might be handed out when kids go trick-or-treating. Yikes!

There's currently no direct evidence that anybody is actually planning to hand out marijuana edibles to kids, but this is Colorado's first Halloween since the sale of marijuana became legal so it's also hard to say for sure that there's no cause for concern. After all, edibles are for sale in Colorado, and if they're not in their original packaging, there is really no way to tell a marijuana-infused treat from a regular one.

"Marijuana candy is a real concern," said Rachel O'Bryan of SMART Colorado, a lobbying group that focuses on keeping pot away from kids. "[M]any parents don't know, marijuana is in candy. We see this as a problem and we don't believe it's being blown out of proportion."

And it could be a real problem if there are enough people who are stupid enough to try slipping kids pot candy. After all, edibles can be extremely potent, and Colorado hospitals have been treating more and more patients for accidental marijuana overdoses as a result, including one man who claims to have been sold marijuana candy at a fairground, despite the seller insisting the product was cannabis-free. So if anyone is handing out edibles to kids — who are notorious for eating their candy all at once after getting back home — that could get bad pretty quickly.

As a result, groups like SMART Colorado and the Denver Police are urging parents to be on the lookout.

Still, it's hard to get too worked up about this problem. I mean, parents should probably check their kids' candy just in case — something they should be doing already anyway — but as someone who grew up in Colorado, I can tell you that all the edibles I've seen since legalization happened have labelled themselves as edibles. So parents should be able to spot them pretty quickly. And I suppose there is a non-zero possibility of someone taking the pot candy out of the original packaging and repackaging it, but that seems like a lot of work.

Plus, there's the fact that pot candy is expensive. If you wanted to buy up enough to actually hand out to a neighborhood full of children, it would set you back way more than a couple bags of M&Ms. And for what? For a (very twisted) joke? It just doesn't seem all that likely, especially if you factor in the time and effort you'd also have to spend disguising them.

Add to that the fact that there have been very, very few cases of anyone actually deliberately tampering with Halloween treats, and I feel comfortable saying Colorado trick-or-treaters should be just fine.