Hospitalizations of young children because of accidental cannabis ingestion are up in Michigan and across the country.More than 400 kids under 6 went to the emergency department in Michigan for marijuana ingestion from 2020 to 2022. About 80 were admitted to critical care units.Doctors say the increase comes after legal recreational dispensaries were established in Michigan.Experts say some of the marijuana edibles sold at dispensaries look and taste like candy but contain highly potent doses of THC.
Some of the kids arrive at the ER appearing to be in a coma.
Others are having difficulty breathing and, in rare cases, have to be intubated.
They may have dangerously slow heart rates, or their hearts are beating incredibly fast. Some are limp and unresponsive, while others swing between intense drowsiness and agitation.
For the most part, parents tell ER doctors they have no idea what’s going on: One morning they just couldn’t wake their kid up for school, or they’re just not acting like themselves. And it’s not until medical teams have done extensive workups (often including CT scans, which expose a child to radiation) to rule out other conditions, that the lab results come back positive for THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
“These kids show up looking potentially extremely sick, and really require all of our resuscitative efforts to save their lives,” said Dr. Erica Michiels, an emergency medicine physician and the chair of pediatrics at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids. “And that was something that I just didn’t see before we legalized marijuana in the state of Michigan.”
Michigan is one of several states experiencing a surge of kids under the age of 6 being hospitalized for unintentionally ingesting dangerous levels of cannabis in the wake of legalization.
That’s because these marijuana products often look and taste like candy, cookies, and chocolate, experts say. And the products themselves are also often far more potent than in the past, making it easier for small children to quickly ingest potentially toxic amounts of THC.
“Many of the packages just look like a package of gummy bears that a child is very accustomed to opening and eating the whole package,” Michiels said. “And that can produce a massive overdose in a very small child.”
A spike in hospitalizations
In the first two full years since legal recreational marijuana dispensaries opened in Michigan, there was a 74% increase in reports of cannabis ingestions among children under the age of 6, according to the Michigan Poison and Drug Information Center.
More than 400 of those kids went to the emergency department, according to the center’s data, and more than 230 were hospitalized, with about 80 kids admitted to critical care units.
That’s likely an undercount, however, since not all hospitals report pediatric cannabis ingestions to poison control.
Nationally, the number of kids under 6 experiencing unintentional cannabis exposure soared by more than 1,000% between 2017 to 2021, according to a recent study analyzing reports in the National Poison Data System.
There were more than 3,000 of these exposures in 2021, along with a “significant increase in the severity of acute toxicity” that resulted in more critical care admissions and hospitalizations across the board.
“The potency has increased a lot of times in these small doses,” said Varun Vohra, director and clinical toxicologist at the Poison and Drug Information Center at the Wayne State University School of Medicine. “So it doesn’t take as much to get them to that ‘toxic threshold.’”
“Whether that’s a kid who’s just very drowsy for a long period of time, not behaving like they normally are, or they’re not eating or drinking,” he said. “Or in the worst case scenario, they lose their airway to severe respiratory depression. They could have seizures.”
Most kids just need some time for the effects to wear off, doctors say, and do well with some fluids and monitoring to make sure their breathing remains stable. But an increasing number require intensive care, and some may need to stay in the hospital for days.
“I would say that kids can die from this if they don’t get medical support,” Michiels said.
“Most parents would very reasonably say, ‘Wow, I had no idea that this could be so serious, and I am going to take all of my marijuana and lock it up because I never want this to happen to my child.’ But I think a lot of people out there have no idea that a marijuana ingestion can be this serious.”
Most parents have no idea their kid can wind up in the hospital after accidentally eating edibles, doctors say. But these cases are rising in Michigan emergency rooms. Read More
