Everyone’s freaking out about their kids accidentally eating one of those weed gummy Nerds Ropes this Halloween, but let me tell you—as a woman who actually accidentally ate one of those weed gummy Nerds Ropes—you’re all going to be fine.
The panic began last Thursday, when a small-town police department in southwestern Pennsylvania made a Facebook post warning parents about all the “drug-laced edibles” kids might unknowingly score while trick-or-treating in a couple weeks. “Drug laced edibles are packaged like regular candy and may be hard to distinguish from the real candy,” a representative for the Johnstown Police Department later told CBS News in a statement.
Videos by VICE
One such treat that the Johnstown PD calls out by name is a candy edible that resembles a Nerds Rope, a bunch of which they confiscated during a recent drug bust. The weed gummy Nerds Rope looks a lot like a regular Nerds Rope, right down to the nearly identical packaging, but it contains 400mg of THC, which regular Nerds Ropes do not. (The actual candy’s manufacturer, Ferrara Candy Company, confirmed to CBS News that “this product is counterfeit.”) I guess the cops are worried that some rando is gonna put these THC-filled Nerds Ropes in kids’ candy bags on Halloween—or, rather, they want parents to think that that’s a real thing that could really happen, or else how would they justify keeping weed candy away from consenting adults and arresting the fine ladies and/or gentlemen and/or nonbinary individuals who sought to sell them to said consenting adults?
Let’s say that somehow, some way, some weirdo in your neighborhood decided to give your kids the weedy Nerds Rope. (Even though people aren’t just, like… giving their drugs away because drugs cost money??) Let’s say your kid eats in. Let’s say…your kid will probably be fine. Trust me. I speak from experience.
I recently Got Too High after taking two honkin’ bites out of a THC-filled Nerds Rope at a party without realizing it wasn’t just regular candy and was, in fact, filled with THC. My friend told me “No!! Don’t!!” as I went in for bite number two, but I was kinda drunk and thought she was doing a bit! I ended up spending the rest of the night in a bed “like a dog on ketamine,” as one friend later put it, but you know what? I survived. And so will your kid. Eating weed might be scarier than smoking it, but it can’t kill you—even if you’re underage.
If you want to protect your kids from THC-filled Nerds Ropes this Halloween…literally keep doing what you’re doing because there’s literally no chance they’re going to accidentally get their hands on one while they’re out trick-or-treating. If they do happen to have a weed gummy Nerds Rope in their candy bags, it’s because they intentionally bought one. In that case, why not be a good parent and explain how to responsibly consume an edible so they don’t miss out on a fun night by getting too stoned? A tiny bite of a weedy Nerds Rope should be enough to get your kid high, according to this first-timer’s guide to edibles, so please! Feel free to pass that along!
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Harron Walker on Twitter .