"Would be great to hear from you," the police service tweeted.
There was nothing sweet at all about cannabis-infused treats found hidden inside a hedge that could have proved dangerous if discovered by children.
A treasure trove of cannabis sweets was found in a suspicious package tucked away in the hedge on a residential street in Ivybridge by a citizen. The person then handed in the cannabis products to the Devon and Cornwall Police in the U.K.
The assortment of goodies prompted PS Watkins, a police constable with the police service, to post a cheeky tweet for the owner. “Have you lost your ‘sweets’?” asks the tweet this weekend. “Would be great to hear from you.”
Each packet reportedly had a cannabis warning. The treats contain cannabis that has “been through a distillation process,” notes another tweet by Watkins.
Distillation and isolation is a process that “take place in the final stages of creating a cannabis oil extract,” notes Alberta-based Maratek, a company that engineers solvent recycling and cannabis/hemp extraction technologies.
The laced sweets, on the other hand, also contained a high quantity of THC.
“Fortunately not found by children as that could have been disastrous,” Watkins tweeted, adding that “the packaging could easily mislead people and cause children to be very unwell.”
Recreational cannabis, considered a Class B substance, remains illegal throughout the U.K.
There have been numerous concerns raised about high-THC sweets packaged to look like regular candies and the potential harm to children.
In early September, several parents in the U.K. said they believed their children got sick after accepting “laced” cannabis from teens at a Carmarthenshire park.
That same month, West Yorkshire Police issued an alert for parents to be aware of the dangers of cannabis edibles after some children were struck ill.
And in May, Northamptonshire police issued a second warning about the dangers of cannabis-laced sweets after colleagues in Surrey reported that four children had been hospitalized after ingesting suspected cannabis sweets.
“Sometimes, one package equals multiple adult servings,” making something like a chocolate bar “particularly dangerous for a child who might eat the entire bar,” the website adds.
And this relates to legal edibles. Plenty of illegal cannabis products are advertised as having high THC levels.
A recent Canadian study found labels for illicit edibles were often inaccurate. “Accuracy of illicit edible potency claims were either indeterminate or ranged from 23 per cent to 38 per cent,” the findings indicate.
“Illicit cookie and cereal bar products that claimed to contain high levels of THC contained only a fraction of what was claimed,” study authors add.
But Health Canada offered caution in an advisory issued in the summer of 2020. Although less is known about the contents of illegal products, given they are unregulated and untested, both illegal and legal products could still pose a threat to children, the advisory cautioned, adding that these need to be properly stored and secured.