Another child comatose for three days, possibly after eating cannabis-laced Haribo candy
Another child spent several days in a coma due to cannabis poisoning, possibly after eating cannabis laced Haribo candy, his mother told RTL Nieuws. The 9-year-old boy from Zeeland was comatose and unresponsive in the pediatric ICU for three days. A child from Twente also ended up in a coma after eating the drugged candy. Both are doing well again.
The Zeeland boy suddenly became very sick on Friday, May 23. He vomited, was crying, had stomach pain, headaches, and kept thinking he was going to faint. The emergency services responded with a trauma helicopter and rushed the child to a hospital in Goes. A brain scan didn’t reveal a cause for the boy’s symptoms, so he was transferred to the more specialized Sophia Children’s Hospital in Rotterdam.
By that time, the boy was unresponsive in a coma. The hospital did several tests and that night, informed the boy’s mother that cannabis had been found in his urine. That was a massive shock, the woman told RTL Nieuws. She had no idea where he could have come into contact with drugs, so she reported the incident to the police.
The boy regained consciousness after three days in a coma and returned home on May 26. Three days later, the missing piece of the puzzle fell into place when the food safety authority, NVWA, issued a warning about cannabis found in a batch of Haribo sweets after two children and an adult from Twente had become ill. Haribo ordered a recall of the sweets involved - Happy Cola F!ZZ with a best before date of January 2026 - throughout the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg as a precaution.
“My heart really stopped for a moment when I saw that news. I immediately called the police again, and they came to talk to my son. He told them that he had eaten Haribo sweets that afternoon.” But because no one even thought to link the candy to the boy’s illness, the family didn’t think to preserve the packaging. So the two incidents cannot definitively be linked.
The NVWA is aware of the Zeeland boy, and the police are investigating. The boy is doing well again, under the circumstances. He is back at school and feeling mostly normal, although he still struggles with nightmares.
His mom mainly wants to get to the bottom of how this could have happened. “I’m really very angry. Candy is meant for children, aimed at children. The fact that there are drugs in candy is too absurd for words. Whoever did this is not right in the head. As a parent, I can’t understand how you would ever think of doing this.”
