Nobody's Handing Out Edibles on Halloween

Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which means the warnings are due. Somewhere a police department will post a photo of gummies packaged to look like Nerds, a local anchor will tell parents to inspect every piece of candy, and plenty of families will spend the weekend picturing a stranger slipping THC into a bowl of fun-size Snickers.

I work in the cannabis business, so let me say plainly what everyone in it already knows. Edibles are expensive. No one who paid dispensary prices for them is going to waste them on a stranger's ungrateful kid who grabs a handful and runs to the next house. The people who have gone looking for the poisoner in this story have been coming back empty-handed since 2010.

The warnings almost never start with a child. They start with a bust. In September 2021, police in Bensalem, Pa., seized 50 edibles dressed up as snack brands and told parents to check their kids' Halloween bags. The department's public-safety director later told VERIFY the seizure had nothing to do with Halloween and that the department had never received a report of contaminated candy going to a child. Last October, police in Warren, Mich., warned parents after finding counterfeit THC candy while serving a search warrant. They also said they had no evidence any of it was meant for trick-or-treaters.

The pattern is as old as legal edibles. On Oct. 29, 2010, days before Californians voted on Proposition 19, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department warned about THC treats packaged to resemble commercial candy. It cited no case. In 2016 the sheriff of Bureau County, Ill., warned that chocolate bars found in a trick-or-treat bag might contain cannabis. A field test said yes. A lab said no. The leaf on the wrapper was a Japanese maple. In 2017, when New Jersey authorities issued their own warning, a spokesman for the state attorney general declined to cite a single Halloween case when the Associated Press asked for one.

The people who study this for a living have reached the same conclusion. Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has tracked reports of tainted Halloween treats back to 1958. He has never found a child killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat picked up while trick-or-treating. Asked about cannabis, he told Snopes it "would be a very expensive prank." The National Confectioners Association set up a hotline for tampering reports in 1982 and shut it down in 2012 because police weren't seeing tampering. When Snopes searched every Halloween from 2010 through 2021, it found no case of anyone deliberately giving children edibles to harm them.

There is one real case, and it deserves to be told accurately, because it cuts both ways. On Halloween 2022, trick-or-treaters ages 6 to 16 in Winnipeg's South Tuxedo neighborhood came home with zip bags holding a full-size chocolate bar and a package made to look like Nerds. The packages claimed 600 milligrams of THC. Canada caps legal edibles at 10 milligrams a package. Police traced them to a couple who had handed out their own illicit stash. In a warrant application, police said the couple had plenty of ordinary candy on hand and called it criminal negligence. The wife told the court she hadn't been wearing her glasses. Prosecutors stayed the charges against the husband. She pleaded guilty to supplying cannabis to a young person and was fined $5,000 in March 2024. The judge said he accepted that it was inadvertent. No child was harmed.

Jacob Sullum of Reason, who has covered this scare for a decade, calls Winnipeg the closest documented example he has found. The other case people point to, from South Chicago Heights, Ill., the same night, involved a man who ran out of candy and filled empty dispensary packets with gummy bears. Police charged him with child endangerment. When Mr. Sullum asked for the lab results a year later, police told him to file a public-records request.

So in all these years, there is one case anyone can document, and it shows carelessness with an illegal product, not a plot. That distinction matters. The warnings describe a villain who wants to hurt children, someone rich enough to give away product that costs $15 to $40 a piece, by NORML's 2021 estimate, and reckless enough to risk prison for nothing. That person doesn't exist. And the THC products in Winnipeg and Warren were illicit or counterfeit, not something a licensed store is allowed to sell.

The real danger is less dramatic and much more common. A study in Pediatrics found that poison-center reports of children under 6 eating cannabis edibles rose from 207 in 2017 to 3,054 in 2021. Nearly 98% of those exposures happened at home. More than half were 2 or 3 years old, and about 8% ended up in critical care. A study published this year in the Journal of Addiction Medicine counted 8,430 exposures in children under 6 in 2024, up from 132 in 2009. A separate study published in August tracked 25 years of accidental drug ingestions by children under 6 and recorded six deaths. Four involved fentanyl and two involved cocaine. Halloween has nothing to do with any of it. The director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center said in 2021 that his center saw no uptick in cannabis calls around Halloween, and that October and November are slow months.

Why does the scare survive? Mike Robinette of Arizona NORML put it bluntly in the same story: the fear "comes from prohibitionists fear-mongering through the years." I'd go further. This propaganda has a cost. When the warning turns out to be nothing every October, parents stop listening, and the one message that would protect children gets lost in the noise.

That message is simple. Check the candy, because it takes two minutes. Toss anything unwrapped or homemade. Then go home and look at your own kitchen. If you keep edibles, store them up high, locked, in their original packaging, nowhere near the candy bowl. If a child gets into them, call poison control at 800-222-1222 without waiting for symptoms.

And watch the street. According to the National Safety Council, children are more than twice as likely to be hit and killed by a car on Halloween as on any other day of the year. Nobody's coming down your block with a $40 gummy for the kid in the skeleton costume. The car turning the corner is a different story.

Mr. Silverstein is founder and CEO of New York 420 Week.