When I was a kid, a childhood fad was those scratch-‘n-sniff stickers; you know, you scratch a picture of a chocolate bar and lean close and smell chocolate. There was a whole range of flavors — everything from orange and lemon to gasoline and motor oil.
It was those last two fragrances that caused an uproar among activist groups, eventually culminating in the end of scratch-‘n-sniff gasoline and motor oil stickers for fear that a slight sniff of manufactured "fumes" would lead gullible children to huff the real thing. (As a personal note, I collected a few of those stickers in my youth and was never tempted to huff gas or oil fumes.)
Well, now another novelty item is apparently going the way of the scratch-‘n-sniff stickers of gas and motor oil: Suck-‘n-taste marijuana-flavored candy is being targeted for prohibitive legislation around the country:
"The [Chicago] City Council passed a law Wednesday banning the sale of marijuana-flavored lollipops, gumdrops and other treats, becoming the first major city to prohibit the confections that have appeared in convenience stores nationwide.
"The candies are legal because they are made with hemp oil, an ingredient used in health foods and some household products. The oil imparts marijuana’s grassy taste but not the high.
"’I can’t imagine the degree and the extent to which people will go to make a buck — and to make a buck on kids, trying to get them to experiment with something that is going to be a lead-in to the use of marijuana,’ said Alderman Edward Burke, who sponsored the measure.
"Chicago is not the only city weighing the issue. A New York City councilwoman plans to hold hearings on the candies this summer, and an Atlanta suburb passed a resolution opposing them, which caused merchants there to remove the treats from their shelves."
While such legislation may indeed be proper, I long for the day when such novelties will die by the Law of Supply and Demand: Enough parents will refuse to purchase — and refuse to allow their children to purchase — such items that the supply of the product will dry up because there is no demand for it.
You are absolutely right, as Christians we vote with our dollars, and if enough of us stopped buying the silly things that are produced, the companies that produce them would have to find something else to make. Competition is a form of regulation as well.
But this did conform to supply and demand. I’ve never seen these things; I imagine their only market were niche novelty stores of the kind that I usually avoid, that my children would be decidedly dicouraged to enter. Within their niche they clearly must have enjoyed some measure of success. Methinks it isn’t so much the product to which you object, but the whole sub-culture that supports such a thing. Because of that, it is impervious to “parents refusing to purchase/allowing their children to purchase”. “Your parents aren’t cool” is the mantra of that subculture, it’s raison d’etre.
I can’t imagine why anyone would want the taste of marijuana without the high. We’re not talking about wine here, folks. The only thing I can imagine is that this is being marketed to aging hippies who are nostalgic for their misspent youth but don’t want the loss of worktime and productivity they’d have to go through if they actually got wasted. I wouldn’t worry about this candy being used to get kids hooked: if they don’t already like marijuana for its effects, they’ll taste it and say, “Dude, this stuff is nasty. I need a Snickers to get the taste out of my mouth.”