Don't Be a Lemonhead

Yellow and blue illustration of a lemonhead character on a blue oval with two yellow lemons on the left with yellow and blue text on a white background

Lemonhead candy has been manufactured by the Ferrara Pan Candy Company since 1962. The candy is created using the cold panned process just like Red Hots, another Ferrara Pan candy. To create candy using this method you create the center of the candy, then toss these pieces into spinning pans while adding color, flavor, and miscellaneous ingredients. In the early 2000s, Ferrara Pan Candy Company created a range of candies inspired by the original Lemonhead; including Orangehead, Cherryhead, Applehead, and Grapehead.

A surge of anti-drug rhetoric and campaigning took place in the 1970s. The Nixon administration Ad Council spent over 100 million dollars on anti-drug campaigning between 1970 and 1972. One of the first taglines of the campaign was “Why do you think they call it dope?” Many other taglines revolving around dope and anti-drug messaging circulated at the time. Originally in the 1880s, opium was referred to as dope. By the 1970s, dope was used mainly to refer to marijuana, although today, dope is used to refer to a number of different drugs.