Ideologically Impure Food

Jacob Sullum | March 23, 2007

This week the Georgia House of Representatives approved a bill that would prohibit the sale of marijuana-flavored candy to minors. The bill says products such as Pot Suckers and Kronic Kandy, which are not psychoactice but have a pot-like palate because they're flavored with hemp essential oil, create the "false impression that marijuana is fun and safe."

First of all, yuck. Getting marijuana flavor without the high is worse than drinking alcohol-free beer. Although some people swear the taste of cannabis enhances savory dishes such as chili, the idea of deliberately adding it to sweets sounds revolting. When you make cookies or brownies with cannabis (I hear), you try to minimize the marijuana flavor as much as possible. If you fail to do so, the result is not a delicious treat that happens to get you high but something you would never eat if it weren't psychoactive.

I have to assume, then, that the main attraction of pot-flavored, nonpsychoactive candy is that it's perceived as cool, which is precisely what the Georgia legislators are worried about. They are not claiming the candy itself is dangerous; rather, it's the message sent by the candy to which they object. The "false impression" they decry happens to be true: Marijuana is fun and safe (with safe understood to mean not 100 percent risk-free but acceptably hazardous given the payoff). In any case, as with the DEA's vain, deranged crusade against hemp foods (which are not only nonpsychoactive but generally don't taste like pot either), the target of this legislation is, in essence, ideas that offend goverment officials. 

Tom Murphy of Vote Hemp, which successfully fought the DEA ban, had this to say about the Georgia bill: "This makes you wonder if they would consider banning a coca-flavored soft drink that's marketed to children..."

[via the Drug War Chronicle]