Today I got a call from Gordy's day camp manager. He started off the call by saying, "Gordy is fine, happy and healthy". He then continued with, "but I need to tell you about an incident that happened at camp today". My immediate thought was that something happened between Gordy and this girl who he refers to as "the bully". However, I was wrong.
I was informed that one of the kids in Gordy's group had found a container of something on the ground. The kid supposedly thought that the contents of the container were mints, so he shared them with his campmates. The camp leader eventually stopped the kids after one kid tattled, and the upon inspection, the leader saw that the container was ZYN cool mint nicotine pouches. Apparently Gordy was involved in the taste testing and the camp manager wanted to let me know that they'd been monitoring him for 60 minutes for signs of poisoning and he appeared to be fine.
While this didn't sound too bad initially, I started thinking that there was a chance that this container actually contained something different than what was on the label and that could mean some potentially dangerous things. I also became very frustrated that the camp had known about this for 60 minutes and had decided on their own to monitor my kid without letting me know. From what I can gather on the internet, if what Gordy had ingested had contained fentanyl, he could have died in that 60 minutes. So, I hopped in the car and drove to the camp ready to severely scold my kid for being such an idiot to ingest something that his friend found on the ground and to let the camp know how unimpressed I was with their response to the situation and how potentially dangerous it had been. Turns out I wasn't the only parent doing all of the above.
After I picked Gordy up, I asked him what had happened at camp. He very honestly had no idea what I meant. I had to specifically ask him about the "mints" in order to get him to understand what I wanted to know. He said there wasn't much to tell except that a few of the older kids (10ish yr olds) had some mint candies that they wanted to share with the younger kids. They told the younger kids (Gordy included) to hold out their hands and they dumped the pouch contents (white chunky powder) onto the kids palms. They told the kids to lick it, and the younger kids did. Gordy said he only tried a little bit, but that he dumped the rest off his hand because the mint taste was too strong. He said that was pretty much it. He had no idea that the pouch contained nicotine or anything else dangerous until I showed up.
At that point, we had reached our car and I broke down in tears. I told him how dangerous something like that could have been and he became very sad and apologetic. He said that those kids were his friends (one is actually on our swim team) and he trusted them. He never would have thought that the stuff was anything other than what they had told him.
Since he told me the truth about what happened, we decided that he didn't deserve a massive punishment. He did, however, need to spend an hour in his room by himself to think about what happened and to understand how much worse it could be. He was quite upset about the whole thing, and said he understood and that he was sorry. He couldn't believe that he had "eaten drugs". We agreed that he should NEVER accept any candy, mints, or other things from anyone except from people who we agree ahead of time who we trust. Instead, if someone offers him candy and he is sad that he has to say no, he should tell us and then we'll buy it for him if that's what it takes.
A few hours later, the camp called to say that they took the container to the police and a pharmacy for inspection. The police said that they had no reported incidents including fentanyl and that type of nicotine. The pharmacy said that they sold that same type of product and that it did not look like it had been tampered with and that the contents looked normal to them. So, Gordy likely only ingested a small amount of nicotine and nothing else. Thankfully, this whole thing was a very good lesson for everyone without too much harm.
