DENVER (CBS4) – Just in time for Halloween, a Colorado company is releasing a home testing kit that allows parents to screen their kids’ candy for marijuana. The product release comes on the heels of a local hospital and police department warning parents that edible marijuana can easily be mistaken for Halloween candy.

“They need to look at every single piece of candy,” said Jill Boyle, the emergency room director at Saint Anthony’s Summit, which launched an informational campaign asking parents to be “edible aware.”

“Edibles have a large amount of THC in them,” Boyle said. “We don’t want our children getting a hold of that and being critically ill.”

The Denver Police Department is also concerned about edible marijuana and Halloween. Police officers teamed up with a marijuana dispensary to make a public service announcement.

“The problem is that some of these products look so similar to the products that have been on the market that we’ve eaten as children,” Patrick Johnson, the owner of Urban Dispensary, says in the warning video. “There is really no way for a child or a parent or even an expert in the field to tell you if a product is infused or not.”

Now a local company, CB Scientific, has come up with a $15 kit that empowers parents to test candy for THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. The kit works essentially the same way as a home pregnancy test kit.

CBS4 wanted to see if the kit works and created a blind test, providing a number of unwrapped candies and cookies, some containing marijuana and some without.

Derek LeBahn with CB Scientific demonstrated the procedure. He first selected a cookie, taking a pinch, and putting it in a test tube. He then added some solution and dye and shook the product. Within seconds he tells us the first cookie was negative for marijuana.

But the second cookie he tried was a different story. “See it turn pink? Definitely a positive for THC.” LeBahn explained the more red the solution becomes, the more potent the edible.

Then he tried some chocolate, “Definitely positive for THC as it begins to turn pink.”

CBS4 tried to throw the test kit for a loop with a sample of fake marijuana. But after repeating the testing process, the test was negative.

“It would have started turning red already,” he said. LeBahn recommended waiting 10 minutes to make sure, explaining some products with a low level of THC may take longer to show a positive result. LeBahn said the test kits may also help medical marijuana users who want to get a sense of how potent their medical marijuana products are.

The THC detection test kit provides three tests for the $15 price. They can be purchased online at http://www.cbscientific.com. They are sold locally at select marijuana dispensaries, Way to Grow Garden Centers and Freaky’s head shops.

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