Police Mistake Maple Leaves for Marijuana, Tell Whole Town Someone’s Giving Pot Candy to Kids

We really can’t have nice things in this world. Some cool person in Illinois decided to break the mold a bit this year and instead of handing out the same old Snickers or Butterfinger bars as everybody else, distributed cool, imported Japanese candy instead. That is a great idea! It’s interesting and out-of-the-box, and it gets kids exposed to new flavors and stuff they might not have seen before. I want to give that person a high-five, but I can’t because they’re probably hiding in their house from pitchfork-wielding mobs, because some parents saw the treats, flipped out, and called the cops to say that someone was passing out marijuana candy to children on Halloween.

In the parents’ defense, the candy was covered in pictures of tiny, colorful maple leaves, and a Japanese maple leaf does look a little bit like a marijuana leaf. I have five Japanese maple trees in my yard. I hope nobody calls the police on me. At this point I don’t even trust people to know that marijuana doesn’t grow on trees. According to US News, the police wasted no time in running with the parental panic and posting an emergency “marijuana candy” notice to Facebook, though.

A parent who saw the candy, which was marked “Crunch Choco Bar,” mistook the maple leaves on the label for marijuana and called the police, who also mistook the maple leaves for marijuana and sent out an emergency release on Facebook telling parents that the candy was covered in pictures of cannabis leaves and urging parents to inspect their children’s candy and asking for information on the house that was distributing the candy. They also said that the candy tested positive for marijuana in a field test.

If the police really field tested the candy and the tests came back positive, that’s pretty disturbing, because it seems like the field tests for these things are extremely unreliable. A Florida man is suing the police after he was arrested for meth possession after a positive field test indicated there was meth in his car. It turned out the “meth” was icing from a Krispy Kreme doughnut and the field test gave a false positive. These tests don’t seem very trustworthy if they’re giving positive results to innocent candy and doughnut sugar.

The maple leaf candy has been sent to a lab for proper drug testing, and the results of that test are not back yet, but it seems likely that the candy is completely innocent. A blogger from Dankspace who bothered to Google the candy in question after the police issued the warning said that the candy in question is actually a neat Japanese candy from a brand called Iroha Kaede, after a maple tree with colorful leaves.

Whoever handed out the cool Japanese candy must be in the middle of their own personal Crucible over in Manlius, IL, right now, just because they tried to do something nice for Halloween.