NBC News explains:

The Halloween tale of marijuana handed out to trick-or-treaters is as real as a ghost story

Telling parents to fear that their kids might be handed an expensive edible is just another way to make marijuana and its users the boogeyman.

Police and parents across the country are currently freaking out that those of us who enjoy a marijuana edible gummy now and then will maliciously hand them out to jovial, unsuspecting trick-or-treaters on Halloween night.

This is a ridiculous and unfounded claim. If anything, this is just another way for the anti-weed apologists to demonize marijuana yet again.

Let me clear up one thing here: No one, absolutely no one, will be handing out marijuana edibles en masse to unsuspecting minors this Halloween.

How can I be so confident about that? Well, there are many reasons. Firstly, edibles that contain THC (the psychoactive component of marijuana) aren’t cheap. Depending on what you buy, they can run between $10 and $20 —and even more than that in some places. Even CBD edibles — which lack the psychoactive component of marijuana and are more readily commercially (if not always legally) available — start at $1.50 per tiny, unwrapped piece. Nobody who purchases them is going to be giving them away like some cheap candy corn or Hershey’s Kisses.

Secondly, edibles with THC purposefully don’t resemble candy for kids — especially in places such as Colorado and Washington state where such products are legal. There are laws banning any edibles shaped like animals, fruits, humans (which is weird anyway) or anything else that would entice a child to grab and eat one assuming it was regular candy.

THC-infused and many CBD-infused edible gummy typically don’t come in wrappers but are sold as 10 or more in a sealed, container. The THC-infused ones are additionally slapped with warning and safety labels that say things like, “For use by adults 21 and older. Keep out of reach of children.”

All of these precautions is why it’s a good idea for more states to legalize marijuana across the board: You can’t regulate a black market. So if there are weed providers packaging edibles in misleading-but-familiar wrappers in places where they are still criminalized — such as Iowa, Virginia and Pennsylvania, for example — that’s because they have to hide the edible from law enforcement to sell them to adults, not to dole them out to unsuspecting kids in costumes. Legalization removes that incentive entirely.

Now, does all the safety steps taken by the industry mean that there aren’t bad people in the world? Of course there are. (I am increasingly convinced there are mostly bad people in this world.) But growing up, there was a solid rule while trick-or-treating in my neighborhood of East Los Angeles to protect us from them: Don’t take fruits, baked goods, or anything that isn’t in its original wrapping. It’s sound advice. And, as my parents did, just inspect your kids’ goodie bags and winnow out anything — absolutely anything — that’s questionable before the kid dives in face first.

The full article is worth a read, but those are the main points that are worthy of repetition here: 1, while there are bad people, handing out edibles en masse is insanely expensive and thus impossible; 2, inspect your kids treats and follow rules handed down for decades and they will be safe; 3, regulations are better than unregulated black markets, where clearly marked packages replace packages that are not clearly marked when there aren’t reasons to hide “criminal” plants in food form. Demonizing marijuana is backfiring with this myth. Prohibitionists frequently make the best advocates for legalizing marijuana, and they seem to be doing it with this story yet again. Props to NBC News for dispelling this myth.