Its Halloween and that means the boogeyman has come out from his hiding spot. The trickster arrives each fall to fool and frighten us. Every year we hear of the terrors waiting for kids in their trick-or-treating bags. This year, however, the trickster is the Pennsylvania State Police.

When I was a kid we had a map ready to go for trick-or-treat night. We knew were the consistent candy givers were, we remembered where you could get a king size Baby Ruth from the nice old lady who just loved seeing kids in their costumes. And we knew when we returned home our candy was going to be inspected. The parental review always seemed silly to me; I thought “wouldn’t I notice a razor blade in my candy bar?”

On Monday the Pennsylvania State Police issued a “Safety Bulletin” trying to scare parents. In the bulletin, the oogey-boogey spookiness of marijuana is said to be lurking in children’s trick-or-treater bags. “THC levels can be as high as 90%” in weed infused candies the bulletin claims; THC is the active chemical in pot that gets you high. This scariness is based on a New Jersey bulletin released on October 23 that makes the same claim.

The problem is, the claim is bunk. It is pure scare tactic built on an urban legend. No one is going to give your kids pot candies for trick-or-treat. They are expensive and hard to purchase. Besides the idea of giving out the equivalent of $20 cash to scores of kids you probably don’t know… the PSP’s science and math are bad, too.

They are counting on you not noticing, but neither the PSP or New Jersey offer any clinical study or actual analysis to support the percentages they claim. All good scary tales start with a small amount of truth, though. The notion that a prepared product is more pure than a raw ingredient is just common sense. To think of it another way, you could chew on willow bark if you want but popping a couple aspirin will dull that pain in your joints a bit quicker.

A candy bar 90% THC would not be in solid form. It wouldn’t even be able to be a gummy treat. THC is lipophilic, it dissolves in fats and needs to have a binding agent added to form into an edible object. If you have ever tried to bake bread you know what a binding agent does; it’s what allows soft and gooey to become solid. Someone could hand out a really, really expensive item resembling raw butter… but your kids are likely only going to take the things that look like they are 90% sugar… you know, full solid objects.

Commercially available marijuana edibles are packaged according to their potency. Higher quality items are labeled with their expected milligram’s of active THC and its derivatives. A typical edible dose is 10-15mg or up to 100milligrams per day.  Hershey’s Miniatures, a popular candy to give out, is approximately 8 grams per piece.* That means that if a single candy were infused with an average does it would only be  0.17% pot. Less than one percent.

The boogeyman lurking on your kids Trick-or-Treating path is an urban legend that pops up each year. It has been thoroughly investigated. The myth is an excuse for parents to go through their kids’ candy and pick out the good bits. The Pennsylvania State Police’s desperate attempt to make pot evil is nothing more than a new version of an old, tired, urban legend.

*- 43 grams per serving / 5 pieces per serving = 8.6 grams per piece
     15mg THC dose / 8.6g of piece = 0.17% THC per piece of candy