According to a Philadelphia police official, the new products from the Hershey Co., the mint packets, looks almost identical to the tiny heat-sealed bags that are used to sell illegal substances like crack, cocaine and heroin. It seems like it glorifies the drug trade.

The new product was launched in November. Ice Breakers Pacs are dissolvable pouches of the size of a nickel with a powdered sweetener inside.

The packets come in blue and orange plastic slide-up cases and look very similar to drug packets.

William Blackburn, Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector, said that a child that is familiar with the candy can very easily mistake a heat-sealed bag of drugs with the candy and swallow it, the Associated Press reports.

Blackburn said that most of his career he worked as a narcotics officer and he mistook the candy for the real thing.

He said: "It glorifies the drug trade. There's really no reason that a product like this should be on the shelf."

Dallas police Sr. Cpl. Kevin Janse said: “What happens when these drug dealers start unsealing these and putting their cocaine in them and leave them around? And a kid goes, 'Hey, there's one of those Ice Breakers,' and puts a packet of powder cocaine in their mouth? That is going to be dangerous,” MSNBC informs.

He also said that it will also make the work harder for the officers. They will have to spend more time in the field doing tests on anything that looks like the mint.

According to a spokesman for the company, which is based in Hershey, said that each pouch has the Ice Breakers logo, so there shouldn’t be any problem. Each pouch is made by two dissolvable mint strips.  

Spokesman Kirk Saville said: "It is not intended to simulate anything.”

Saville didn’t make any comment on whether the product will suffer any changes regarding its appearance or whether anyone in the company had raised a concern about it.