New Halloween Menace: Meth in Your Kid’s Candy Bag

Just in
case parents get tired of
fruitlessly searching trick-or-treat bags for marijuana-infused
candy, a new Halloween scare is in the works. The San Jose
Mercury News reports
that “police in Hercules are trying to determine who gave a plastic
bag of methamphetamine to a young girl on Halloween, and are
reminding parents to inspect their children’s candy haul for
suspicious items.” This new menace is promising, since meth is
scarier than marijuana, but it has a definite disadvantage: There
is no indication that anyone tried to disguise the meth as candy.
Far from the strawberry-flavored
meth of legend, it was just 0.1 gram of white powder in a tiny
zip-lock bag—but still enough to support a felony possession
charge, according to police, which gives you a sense of how insane
our drug laws are.

“This could have been intentional, or it could have been
accidental,” Hercules police Sgt. Ezra Tafesse told the Mercury
News, “and we won’t know until we speak with the person
who did this.” Or as KNTV, the NBC station in San Jose,
puts it, “police are unsure if the meth found were given to the
child intentionally or on accident.” On accident, I’m guessing,
since the prank potential seems very low, given the lack of
resemblance between the meth and any candy kids are apt to get on
Halloween.

Speaking of accidentally distributing drugs to children,
Hercules, a city of 24,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area, was the
location of another such Halloween incident, this one involving
marijuana. It was the closest thing I could find to
trick-or-treaters getting cannabis candy instead of the regular
kind: Back in 2000, marijuana buds stuffed into wrappers from
miniature chocolate bars turned up in children’s trick-or-treat
bags. Hercules police traced the pot to a postal worker, who
obtained it from an undeliverable package without realizing what
was actually inside  the wrappers. The San Francisco
Chronicle explained:

The treats were the product of a failed and undetected attempt
to mail 5 ounces of marijuana to someone in San Francisco, said
Hercules Police Chief Mike Tye.

“Somebody tried to mail it and didn’t have enough postage or the
address was wrong,” he said.

Because the package, which contained four bags of Snickers bars
destined for San Francisco, did not have a return address, it
landed in the dead-letter office—where it was taken by a postal
employee who planned to hand the candies out to
trick-or-treaters.

“A lot of their dead mail, stuff that’s nonperishable, is given
away to charity,” Tye said. “(The employee) picked up the candy
along with a bunch of canned goods. He took the other items to a
church but kept the candy.”

Because police were convinced that the postal worker had made an
honest mistake, he was neither charged nor publicly named. His
error is obviously quite different from deliberately giving out
marijuana-infused candy disguised as unspiked versions of the same
products: Not only was the marijuana distribution inadvertent, but
no one would mistake marijuana buds for a Snickers bar once the
package was opened. Press coverage of the incident may nevertheless
have fed rumors about malicious strangers trying to trick kids into
ingesting cannabis—just as this meth story may transmogrify into
something more sinister.

According to the Mercury News, by the way, Sgt. Tafesse
said “it is unusual for drugs to be slipped into Halloween candy,
but it happens from time to time, especially with marijuana.” He
did not cite any actual cases.