Wrigley and others are suing over look-alike THC treats | Hacker News Reader

Wrigley and others are suing over look-alike THC treats

nytimes.com

25 pointsbookofjoe44 comments

I suspect it will be a tough job to get rid of these. You can go on Ali express or similar and you will find thousands of sellers selling packaging for every imaginable brand.

It's a bit of a plague, since the way this works is that black market sellers will buy fake packaging and normal candies that match. They will then spray them with THC distillate, and package them in the fake branded packaging.

Each pack is typically marked with a dosage (usually 300mg or higher). Of course, the people making these have absolutely no idea how strong they are. Cursory analysis online showed that typically such a pack would have less than 30mg of THC. This then leads to second order effects such as when consumers become accustomed to "eating 300mg" and then try and eat a correctly dosed edible for the same amount. This can be very unpleasant, a typical dose for a single person is 10mg.

I didn't know THC infused foods were so easy to make. Sounds like people should just skip the middle man and spray the distillate on candy themselves, and probably(?) save on huge markup.

THC infused foods are actually quite simple to make, and no spraying is needed.

THC is fat soluble so at the most basic level, infusing butter with cannabis flower will yield cannabutter which can then be used as a substitute for butter in just about any dish eg. The classic pot brownies you hear of.

The only complexity is dosing, which can be somewhat estimated if you can guess the potency of the flower. It's all a bit back of the napkin math, but you can get a decent estimate. One of my side projects (learning Vue.js) was a edible calculator for doing just this: http://www.scientificedibles.com

That calculator is very nice!

I actually know the CEO of a startup (called tCheck) that's selling pocket spectrometers for measuring butter (and other cannabis infused ingredients) potency quickly and accurately -- I got to tour their lab once, it's some pretty cool tech!

It seems like spraying some Skittles would be easier than spending time baking brownies, but I have no experience in this area.

Spraying is easy Yes, but getting the distillate to do it with is more complicated. You need to basically do the same process by either emulating it by infusing alcohol, or buy distillate outright which is much harder to find. My guess is a lot of these fake eibles actually exist in legal states, where distillate can be found easily. These fake products rely on the consumer being unaware of the fakeness, overstating the dosage (300mg) and under dosing the actual edibles by diluting the distillate spray to reduce costs.

THC is also alcohol soluble, forming the basis of most tinctures and mouth sprays. Also scary names like “green dragon”, which are just higher volume alcohol based solutions that should probably not be consumed by anyone who doesn’t plan to get extraordinarily fucked up.

Slight bit of complexity there, THC-A usually needs to be decarboxylated into THC via heating to a certain temperature before infusion or the resulting butter is pretty mild.

Yeah I didn't mention that in the interest of brevity. Decarb is definitely necessary.

You would be lucky if any actual THC is involved, nowadays its mostly synthetic semi-legal cannabinoids in the black market, at least in Germany (apparently even in some coffee shops in the Netherlands). The market desperately needs to be regulated.

This is utter nonsense scaremongering.

Synthetic cannabinoid products exist, but they’re not commonly sold as anything but synthetic cannabinoids.

This isn’t scaremongering where synthetic drugs are commonly sold in shops where they’re competing with non-synthetic drugs sold on the street, and constantly dodging regulation by reformulating every time a formula is classified.

It is scaremongering. Synthetic cannabinoids are commonly sold, but they are not commonly sold as cannabis as berndi suggests.

Where I live in Germany it may not be the norm but I also came across it several times. Nasty stuff if you suspect something different

Here in the UK years back, unscrupulous growers sprayed the silicate-based additive used in road paintmarkings for reflectivity, as when applied to the buds it made it look like they were of incredibly high quality.

This was not scaremongering, I bought some myself. Twice.

I have connections with people in the old synthetic cannabinoid industry and know how cheap that shit is to buy and how easy it is to order from China, so I don't see in any way it being a stretch of the imagination to envisage people growing poor quality weed and adding to it.

Sounds like a dispute over facts. Bring URLs to defend your case.

Hard to prove a negative. It’s not like this is prevalent enough that there’d be large scale testing of weed going on.

I’m not sure the distinction matters to lots of customers. “Synthetic cannabinoids” as a term suggests to customers that they’re buying something like synthetic cannabis, even if it has significantly different effects, and even if it’s chemically nothing like actual cannabinoids. The only regulation (at least in parts of the US where I’ve looked into it) is banning them where possible, but like whack-a-mole new ones spring up, with new compounds and the same implication that it’s ~weed.

I'm sad to say its anything but scaremongering.

I don't know about the US, but in Germany its common practice to spray either legal CBD weed or regular weed with synthetic cannabinoids and sell it as "Haze". The same goes for hash.

This practice has been widely publicized and is regularly confirmed through tests (see drug checking websites). A quick Google search will demonstrate the abundant availability of the raw materials (fake hash, legal CBD weed, synthetic cannabinoids, fake packaging). Besides this objective evidence, it is both my personal experience and common knowledge on Germany's streets that laced weed is the norm at this point.

Its obvious that this would happen when there is no regulation but strong financial incentives to produce this crap. Many customers don't care or explicitly look for the much stronger high that these laced products provide.

Is this synthetic stuff what is called "spice" in the UK? I read horror stories about the effects of spice and saw it first hand while volunteering at the homeless shelter

Actually, Spice proper used a fairly benign synthetic cannabinoid. It was only after the market showed promise and after they were banned that slew of cheaper knock-offs that became commonly known as 'Spice' (despite having different brand names) came onto the illicit market, using other synthetics that were cheaper/easier to produce, but far-less tested, and deployed and sold in higher strengths by people who were far more cynical.

Germans gotta stand up for rational drug policy, yo. It's insane.

All it takes is one state: Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg — come on people!

----- Edit: Bremen has a famous digital debt clock showing how much money the state owes. Perhaps there should be a similar clock showing how much money the state loses due to the illegality of cannabis (combination of criminal justice costs and expected tax receipts). That might spur the conservative rationalists.

There’s so much weed in the US due to legal states providing cover for black market grow ops that it just isn’t worth it to adulterate weed.

At least in the USA. It will involve thc, just not the thc molecule your expecting. The thc everyone knows and loves is thc 9, this is the psychoactive thc that most gets us "high". The hack occurs from converting CBD (derived from legal hemp plants) to thc. Thc derived from CBD comes as a mixture primarily of thc 8 (call it diet thc gives you a very light buzz or high without the paranoid ) and a minority of this mixture is thc 9 (the thc component that gets you high). Prior to the introduction of converted CBD to thc8/thc9 a kilo of thc9 oil was around $6 to 9 thousand. The converted CBD THC d8/d9 kilos have plummeted the price down to $2-4 thousand

I can anecdotally confirm this, in the US there is a lot of CBD distillate/isolate being turned into delta-8 and delta-9 THC distillate which is then used in edibles, carts, and (speculating here based on the recent price) shatter/concentrates. I’m unsure about the concentrates, but it continues to get cheaper, nearly approaching the price per gram of weed (which shouldn’t be possible?)

A friend of mine has a CBD processing lab and CBD distillate crashed to about $1,000/L in 2019-2020, and hasn’t recovered afaik but I haven’t asked him in a while.

> You can go on Ali express or similar and you will find thousands of sellers selling packaging for every imaginable brand.

Any country could simply tell AliExpress to purge all those listings from their platform. They could threaten to inspect all AliExpress packages at the border till it was done.

Inspecting all AliExpress packages (which are pretty identifyable since they all have 'null' printed on the label due to a long-standing bug) would take months for even a single days trade. That would kill AliExpress as a platform, so I'm pretty sure they'd comply.

1. No-one cares to enforce this. As always, it's usually a gray-area at best. It's not going to win any votes.

2. It would just lead to other work arounds.

Getting AliExpress to hand over a list of buyers of 1000 packs of edible bags might be a good way to audit that all those people are paying the right taxes on what they sell... Could prove pretty profitable for government!

I’ll give you three guesses how many shits governments give about pot heads buying crappy pot.

This makes me wonder, where are the lobbyists/interest groups? Local e-commerce platforms are losing non-negligible amounts of money when people are ordering on AliExpress instead of locally - surely they have every incentive to pressure their respective governments to make AliExpress orders more expensive? On the other hand, maybe they are lobbying for their cause, but all the dropshippers are lobbying even harder in favor of AliExpress?

That’s just an out-and-out argument for protectionism of all kinds. Local providers always want tariff and regulatory barriers against foreign competition. That doesn’t mean it’s in the general interests of customers and the economy for them to get it. It’s just a tax on you to subsidise their jobs. Why shouldn’t they pay a tax to subsidise your job?

It is more complex even than that though. Where do local e-commerce suppliers get a lot of their wares from? In a lot of cases that’s China. Why should they get to do that with no tariffs, but if you do it you get hit by tariffs? Barriers like that often end up hurting everyone.

Would be unwise to do, if you depend on other deliveries from *.cn which maybe withold then, in the usual tit for tat deals of the so called 'free markets'.

It’s amazing that in US one can’t buy a Kinder Surprise legally due to presence of toy in candy product and on the other hand one can legally sell cannabis look-a-like without any issues.

I'm not sure how many states this applies to, but at least in California (the largest state where it's legal), it is not legal to sell cannabis look-a-likes like these. As far as I know, most states where it's legal have very stringent laws on what is allowed on cannabis product packaging, especially to prevent it from being marketed to children.

https://www.packworld.com/home/news/13375460/california-cann...

People complain about targeted online advertising, but outdoor advertising can be more annoying.

I live in San Francisco. During a walk along Mission Street, my 4-year-old son said 'cannabis delivered to your door!', loudly and clearly enough that the person a few feet ahead of us stopped and turned around. He was just reading the huge billboard at the side of the street, and didn't know what the product was.

Without any issues? The article is about how it's probably illegal.

in Colorado you're not even allowed to sell gummy bear edibles, only geometric gummies, because bears and other creatures are apparently too appealing to children.

The refined powder of a plant that gives a jolt of pleasure and leads to craving seems similar whether coming from beet, sugar cane, poppy, or coca leaf.

I don't know what drugs should be legal or not, or how regulated, but if any are regulated, refined sugar and refined fat in their various forms seem to deserve it, especially their marketing to kids.

>They’re protecting their brands — and also, they argue, your kids.

Lol as if Wrigley gives a flying fuck about the health of children.

what on earth made them think they could get away with trashing on someone else's hard earn brand like that?

"the cronic"

Good heavens, not the brand!

is this satire/sarcasm?

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