Now that we’re a few weeks out from Halloween, I just wanted to ask — did anyone’s kids find weed gummies in their candy?
Any “Stony Patch Kids” among the M&Ms or “Doweedos” mixed in with the Almond Joys? No? Well yeah, duh! Despite cannabis workers and activists making themselves hoarse, and now even the New York Times debunking the hysteria, multiple state-appointed attorney generals still think it necessary to fearmonger that American children will be poisoned or dosed to psychosis by malevolent stoners.
These annual warnings of “devastating consequences for children” and “dangerous to human health” ever actually seem to yield in children’s protection, but sure make the cannabis community look bad.
As a Californian, cannabis edibles were available both from permitted dispensaries and anyone who knew how to make cannabutter, yet neither I nor anyone I know had ever gotten a pungent piece of weed candy mixed in with the Starbursts and tiny Reece’s Cups. Having worked in cannabis retail both before and after recreational legalization and regulation, brands in the industry were constantly bracing for how these kinds of stories would impact both their livelihoods and safety.
As Kristi Palmer, the co-founder of Kiva, a veteran cannabis edibles brand founded in 2010, puts it “the Halloween scare stories remind me of the Reefer Madness headlines that helped fuel cannabis prohibition in the 1920’s. It doesn’t give cannabis consumers any credit when cannabis consumers are by and large responsible, health-conscious adults.”
University of Delaware professor Joel Best, who has studied this phenomenon of poisoning kids via Halloween for decades, told Newsweek that this is largely paranoia. “Every couple or three years there are these reports that say, ‘Oh, THC in the candy! Watch out, watch out!’ And I’ve never seen a report after-the-fact that some kid wound up in the emergency room.”
Palmer also believes these stories are “media-fueled” for clicks rather than grounded in fact or actual reporting. By not providing context or room for the cannabis community to defend themselves, they are just an extension of the anti-cannabis rhetoric that criminalized it in the first place. As I’ve previously written about in TBI, the U.S. now sits between two of the world’s only countries that have federally legalized cannabis, yet our president has gone back on his earlier promises of legalization for all fifty states. To understand why these hysterical untruths keep circulating, we have to look at how cannabis has been manipulated for political gain for 100 years.
Cannabis has been part of human society for thousands of years and domesticated as many as 12,000 years ago in Asia, making it one of our species’ first cultivated and genetically manipulated crops. Despite its largely illegal status, indicas and sativas have since permeated nearly every continent on Earth, with the World Health Organization finding it to be the world’s most popular drug; anywhere from 2.5% to 3.8% of the world’ population consumes it annually.
On this land that we now call the United States, cannabis is not a native crop. It was brought over to Central and South America from Spain (who got it from northern Africa, who got it from Western Asia), and its spread up north was a colonial by-product. Garbage human Thomas Jefferson had hemp on his, ahem, plantation. Up until relatively recently, cannabis just was. It was medicinal, cited in both religious and medicinal texts like the United States Pharmacopoeia, even advertised in newspapers as a tonic or tincture. Also, of course, people just smoked it for fun too, because, as you know, it’s hella fun if you don’t have a panic attack or fall asleep.
We can point to a couple of major historical events that catalyzed cannabis’s criminalization in the 20th century. The first was the Mexican revolution. As Mexican citizens established their own country, a lot of them opted to go North for work and stability. Can we blame them? And as it turns out, they would bring cannabis with them. The states didn’t like that and California was in fact the first state to pass legislation against cannabis in 1913.
Then, on the heels of a major world war, as we know, the world economy crashed in the Great Depression in 1929. Millions were unemployed and starving on both sides of the border, and many migrants from Mexico who came for work couldn’t find it. So what did they do? Sparked a doobie to pass the time. Or at least, that’s how Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner, Harry Anslinger, in part helped justify criminalizing the plant at the federal level with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
The rest of the century would be an ebb and flow or attitude and enforcement. There was Reefer Madness in the 1930s, but then the 1960s ushered in a more tolerant era where it seemed like everyone was smoking. Then there was the War on Drugs and the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. And then, as things finally begin to swing in the right direction, activists like Dennis Peron fight for the first cannabis legislation in the country to allow cannabis for medicinal use, namely for AIDS patients.
Since the historic Prop 215 in 1996, cannabis is now legal recreationally in 19 states plus D.C. and Guam, and medically in 36 states plus territories. At the federal level, it is still a Schedule 1 substance. More than a third of the U.S. population lives somewhere with, if not legal access to buying weed from a dispensary, at least being able to walk around with some on you without risking arrest. Tens of thousands of Americans are still locked up on nonviolent cannabis charges. And yet parallel to that are the celebrity brands and endorsements, the market reports worth billions, the innovations coming out of communities who finally feel safe identifying as cannabis lovers.
The glamorization of cannabis over the last handful of years has some upsides, as Heather Cabot outlined in her book “The New Chardonnay: The Unlikely Story of How Marijuana Went Mainstream” where she tells the story of multiple cannabis entrepreneurs, how cannabis changed their lives and how they contributed to an industry that is attractive to wine moms and grandparents.
I remember back in the medical days, vendors could come in with just anything. More than once we saw vapes that smelled like bubblegum, and brownies with handwritten labels, dose unknown. Under Prop 215, there was no infrastructure to regulate cannabis dosages or enforce things like laboratory testing and tracking.
Quality control was a case by case basis, and inventory could resemble a revolving door. I started in 2015, when most business owners were gearing up for what legalization under Prop 64 would do; many I knew voted against it because of how intensely regulated it would make the industry and how it had impacted small businesses in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational cannabis in 2012. Well, it passed, obviously, and with it came an avalanche of compromises operators had to make to survive.
2017 was thus, in short, a regulatory shit show. The taxes in California on cannabis products and the people that make them were and still are egregious and inconsistent, and many beloved brands couldn’t make their pre-64 margins to stay in business. Everything— and I mean everything— had to be tracked and reported seed to sale for the CA government.
Companies were given six months to ramp up to regulations, and a large part of them were about safety. Edibles could no longer be 1000 mg, and everything had to come in child-proof, state-approved packaging. As I previously reported for Leafly (shameless plug), many cannabis businesses barely break even under current taxes on their production, distribution and sales. This is all to say, giving edibles away to kids, financially, makes no sense.
“Edibles are expensive,” says Palmer. “They are highly-regulated, highly-taxed products and every dose is precious to the people who purchase them. The way legal companies like Kiva assuage this is by selling our products only in regulated and licensed retail channels, with child-resistant packaging, warning symbols, tamper-evident labels, and sophisticated branding aimed squarely at adults.”
This is to me the most glaringly obvious reason black market cannabis entrepreneurs aren’t dosing kids. Black or white, making edibles is time-consuming and costly. Think about it like this, if you walk into a dispensary, edibles generally start at $20, maybe $15, and generally fall in the $20–35 range. “Illegal” edibles, anecdotally speaking, cost about the same. People sell drugs to make money; children, who largely have no money, are not profitable customers.
These stories perpetuate not because cannabis is dangerous, but because people are uneducated or have an agenda. Despite a majority of the country supporting cannabis reform, it’s easier to scare people into supporting you if you can point to an enemy. Cannabis prohibition was never about the safety of the plant or protecting people from a deadly drug, but to control people and enforce other political agendas like immigration and racial profiling. It’s been another year without any reported child deaths or trips to the ER due to illegal cannabis ingestion — can we please retire this in 2022?
Gummies for adults that I love:
Now, if you’re of age and looking for a treat that’s got some tricks up its sleeve, I’ve got a never-ending list of goodies you can enjoy knowing the little ones won’t be able to get in.
- Kiva’s Camino Sours: Kiva’s popular gummy line just got bigger with three new flavors, with a twist. Their new Sours line offers three flavors that will make you pucker: Citrus Breeze, Watermelon Spritz and Orchard Peach. All three are dosed at 5mg per piece, and while they make you feel like a kid again, these are for adults only. In Palmer’s words “they’re tailored by terpenes to be uniquely transporting. In a way, this was the perfect opportunity to give people a stimulating flavor experience along with a stimulating cannabis experience.”
- Space Gems Spacedrops: A long-time favorite of mine, the Spacedrops are like gumdrops made at a higher doses of 10mg, and come in either sweet or sour options. They’re also vegan, and made with hash rather than a cannabis oil, lending to the full-spectrum effect that lets you enjoy all the benefits of the cannabis plant.
- Plus Hash Gummies (limited edition): These will not be around forever, so you better run to your closest dispensary. Plus has made a name for themselves in the edible sphere with their discrete cube gummies, and this collaboration with Biscotti Hash takes them to the next level. With a higher dose and a hash base, these are perfect for a night in, out or in between.
- Papa and Barkley Rosin Gummies: Noticing a theme? I am a big fan of edibles made from hash and the benefits of full-spectrum cannabis, which tend to be felt more intensely and for longer. These gummies are sugar-free and made with cannabis rosin in low doses for full control of your experience.
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