Well, yeah. But what's strange is there are no articles about the guy. Only the store that sold it and the company that made it. Can they not find him?
So it was produced by an Osaka company, but the stores selling their product wasn't the reason people got sick. Some "guy" at an outdoors festival was passing them out to minors. The manufacture specifically forbade minors from buying or consuming them. Once festival bro bought them, it was out of their hands.
And if the Japanese company that makes these gummies wants to keep making them, they do have to change recipe to omit HHCH. If they don't, they'll run afoul of the new law now banning it from use in Japan.
Was HHCH the real reason 20 people got sick at one festival on one day? Dunno.
But I don't think they were trying to sidestep the marijuana ban in Japan. Just trying to offer some novelty product to separate tourists from their money.
As I said, the incident in Japan was a complete accident unlike what happened with these two characters.
The store in Japan was unaware of the chemical or what it could do, and there was no way for them to predict that their customers would have such an adverse reaction.
The immediate response to the wave of illnesses in Japan was a change in Japanese law to ban that chemical and the shop immediately pulled it from sale and issued an apology.
Neither the shop nor the Japanese government has any say regarding what the producer of the gummies does outside of Japan.
I love this because the Toymaker is basically Q.
Do this one again, this time use Janeway in the second panel.