By Leah D’Ambrosio
Recently another story was in the news about a 10 year old that had accidentally ingested cannabis-infused gummies. The experience for that family must have been horrific. The fear of not knowing why your child is sick, the horror of realizing he had ingested an edible, and the paralysis that must surely hit you when the police come to arrest you. These all add up to one of the worst days of your life.
It’s easy to trash the parents and make comments about their character, but the reality is it could happen to anyone at any time. When we have infused foods out that look exactly like normal uninfused food, we remove all protection and control from a situation like this.
We hear these stories and it frustrates us. What if that candy had green crosses on it? What if his parents knew any food product with a green cross is infused with marijuana. What if his parents taught him that any food product with a green cross is infused with marijuana and will make him sick (or you can replace marijuana with medicine). If all of those what ifs had happened, this situation may never have happened.
We believe all infused food products should be marked with a green cross. There are many ways this can be accomplished – airbrushing with edible ink, edible ink printers, wafer papers, edible images, etc. Yes, it is one more cost and one more step in the creation process, but if we voluntarily mark our food products, maybe we can lessen the more restrictive regulations.
As legalization spreads across the country, we in the industry need to spend time educating the general public about proper usage, and we also need to take steps to ensure that no one ever mistakes an infused product for an uninfused product.
I always say if there is a brownie on the table I’m eating first and asking questions later, and in my house that’s a dangerous thing because we love our edibles! Thankfully, we now mark all of our homemade and dispensary bought goodies with green crosses. We have taken the guesswork out of the equation.
A child as young as 3 years old can associate a symbol with meaning. The green cross is an easy symbol to recognize for anyone – from 3 years old to 103 years old. The industry uses this symbol to identify dispensaries in every legal state, and it’s used in the United States and internationally as a symbol for medicine. Seems pretty logical to put something like that on our infused food products.
We want to help safeguard people from ever experiencing what happened to the Zagelbaum family and we hope you do too.