JAMAICA-Police probe incident that left several students hospitalized after eating sweets.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – Police have called on an unidentified vendor to report to them as investigations continue into an incident that resulted in several students being rushed to the St Ann’s Bay Hospital on the north coast of the island after consuming sweets laced with THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), a compound found in marijuana.

Senior Superintendent of Police Dwight Powell, the commanding officer for St. Ann, confirmed that the vendor who sold the sweets to the students outside the school’s perimeter fence is unknown to them.

“It is the first time we are told that he visited the school compound,” Powell said in a statement late on Monday.

He said the male vendor is being asked to report to the police, and anyone with information that can identify him or his whereabouts is being asked to call the St Ann police or any of the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s confidential lines.

Powell said the matter is being treated with the strictest urgency, and a team has been dispatched to the hospital and the school “where we are gathering information around this incident.”

Ocho Rios Primary School Principal Suzette Barnes-Wilson said 60 students were taken to the hospital on Monday after the lone vendor, unknown to the students, came by and sold a product to them.

She said the students started to show symptoms with some vomiting, dizziness, and blacking out.
The school said that the Ministry of Education, the police, and the Ocho Rios Health Centre were contacted, and the children were taken to hospital.

Media reports said that the colorful package containing the sweets is decorated with the name ‘Full Throttle Sour Belts.’ and that it has ten servings of the sweets with the advice that it should be kept out of reach of children and is “not intended for use by anyone under 21 years of age.

President of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), Leighton Johnson, said the law is evident on vending and these products being available to minors.

“I think we just need to get back to the point where we enforce the law as it relates to the use of marijuana,” he told the Observer newspaper.