Pineapple sweets dished out by a New Zealand charity have tested positive for potentially lethal amounts of methamphetamine, police said Wednesday, sparking an urgent race to remove them from the streets.
Anti-poverty charity the Auckland City Mission raised the alarm after discovering a batch of the sweets was contaminated with the highly addictive and illegal narcotic, police said.
"An investigation is under way and police are treating the matter as a priority given the risk to the public."
The New Zealand Drug Foundation said a test sample of an innocuous-looking piece of white candy in a bright yellow wrapper indicated it contained methamphetamine.
Foundation spokeswoman Sarah Helm said the tested sweet contained approximately three grams of meth -- hundreds of times greater than the common dose taken by users.
"Swallowing that much methamphetamine is extremely dangerous and could result in death."
Helm urged people who had received confectionaries from the Auckland charity not to consume them.
"We don't know how widespread it is."
The candy was donated anonymously by a member of the public, the charity said, in a sealed branded package. The sweets were then distributed into food parcels.
"There is a potential for New Zealand that there is a lethal substance dressed up as a lolly (sweet)," Helen Robinson from Auckland City Mission told reporters.
"We have to work on the assumption that this was a kind of batch."
The charity believes up to 400 people could have received the affected sweets in a food package.
Robinson said so far eight separate families had been affected, but no one had yet been hospitalised.
She knew of an instance where a parent gave one of the candies to her child, who immediately spat it out.
Robinson said she had been told the potent contaminated sweets tasted "acrid and revolting".
"You could have only a very small touch or lick of the substance and still be deeply affected," she warned.
A contaminated sweet was taken for testing when a person felt strange after starting to eat it and noticed a bitter taste.
Methamphetamine can cause chest pain, racing heart, seizures, delirium and loss of consciousness, the drug foundation warned.
Helm told Radio New Zealand it is common for drug smugglers to hide illegal narcotics in food form.
"We suspect somebody hasn't intentionally sought to poison children. It will be up to police to determine," she added in the interview.
