Oops, sorry: New Zealand food bank hands out sweets containing a lethal amount of drugs
Food banks – found all over the world – do incredibly good work. Normally, that is. A food bank in Auckland, New Zealand, made a pretty serious mistake, to put it mildly. Unwittingly, it handed out sweets containing a lethal amount of drugs.
The sweets are wrapped in packaging from Rinda Food Industries. The bright yellow wrapper says that they are pineapple-flavoured sweets. But there was little sign of pineapple flavour. Someone who ate one of the sweets contacted the police because it had a very strange, ominous taste. That turned out to be right: methamphetamine was found in the packaging. It may be better known as crystal meth. Look, these boozy pineapples are still pretty fun – but pineapple sweets with crystal meth?!
To the hospital
According to New Zealand authorities, up to 400 people may now have the sweets in their possession. That is concerning, because the sweets contain lethal amounts of methamphetamine. A test showed that the sweet in question contained 3 grams of the drug. For comparison: a ‘normal’ dose contains between 10 and 25 milligrams of methamphetamine. So it is genuinely extremely dangerous to ingest that much of the drug at once.
Three people have since been taken to hospital with symptoms after eating the sweet. They are believed to be a child, a teenager and an employee of the food bank in Auckland. They have been treated and are out of danger. Just imagine finding out that your child had eaten that sweet…
Contraband
That is what the New Zealand police did, at least, and they concluded that the sweets had to be tracked down as quickly as possible. At least 16 have since been recovered, but it is difficult to determine how many drug-filled sweets are actually in circulation. The police continue to do their best to get all the sweets into their possession as quickly as possible.
Ben Birks Ang of Drug Foundation New Zealand said at a press conference that they are afraid ”more goods of this kind are in circulation. Worldwide, substances are disguised as something else in order to smuggle them somewhere.” Okay, new fear unlocked…
Also read:
- 12x favourite sweets from your childhood that you can still buy (and where to get them)
- Why Fruit Mentos never tastes the same again after playing the back-seat sweet game
- Tingling tongue when you eat pineapple? Not with this tip
Sources: NOS, AD, De Telegraaf, image: Instagram @fmcgbusiness
