WESTFIELD – In what appears to be once-in-a-lifetime event, a city woman has found a prescription pill in a bag of candy.
City police report that at 3:37 p.m. Thursday a Pleasant Street resident came to the station to report that his wife had found a foreign object in a bag of M&M’s he had bought at the Family Dollar Store on Franklin Street.
Lt. Jerome Pitoniak reports that the man said that he had bought a bag of plain M&Ms for his wife but when she started to eat the candies (which Pitoniak Siad were red, white and blue and may have been a leftover patriotic version manufactured for Independence Day) she found one that was hard and tasted wrong.
When she examined it, the unusual find appeared to be a pill.
The resident then brought the candy, and the foreign object, to the police department where Pitoniak reports the pill appears to be a metformin 500 milligram tablet.
Internet research shows that metformin is a widely prescribed oral antidiabetic drug.
He said that the pill was not candy-coated and did not appear to have been through the entire manufacturing process.
“It looked like a loose pill in the bag” Pitoniak said, “it’s basically the same size as an M&M”. He went on to say “It had some color” but explained that he thought the color had probably been transferred to the pill from the candies it was in contact with and was not due to a manufacturing process.
He said he immediately called the contact number on the bag and spoke with company officials of the chocolate division of Mars Inc.
“They were very good”, he said and explained to him the “clean room” procedures that the workers in the plant follow when they report for work and said that they are not allowed to take any personal property at all into the manufacturing area. Nonetheless, Pitoniak was told, the workers are not frisked and it would not be hard to sneak a pill on to the manufacturing floor.
He said that because the code on the bag was incomplete the spokesperson could not tell him the time of day or the machine which processed the suspect bag but did determine that it was made on Tuesday, March 10, 1913 at the plant in Hackttstown, N.J.
Pitoniak, stressing that it was only his guess, suggested that probably what happened is that a diabetic worker who has to take medication during his or her shift snuck the pill in but inadvertently dropped it.
Then, fearing disciplinary action, the worker may have been afraid to report that the pill had fallen among the M&Ms being packaged.
Although the scenario he offered is hypothetical, he did say he was told that no similar cases have been reported to the company and said that there is no reason to believe that any other contaminants are present in the company’s candy.
He did say that the M&Ms have been removed from the shelves at the Family Dollar store, “as a precaution.”
