As legal pot grows, more kids sickened by edibles at home

The number of young kids, especially toddlers, who accidentally ate marijuana-laced treats rose sharply over five years as pot became legal in more places in the U.S., according to a study published Tuesday.

More than 7,000 confirmed cases of kids younger than 6 eating marijuana edibles were reported to the nation’s poison control centers between 2017 and 2021, climbing from about 200 to more than 3,000 per year.

Nearly a quarter of the children wound up hospitalized, some seriously ill, according to a new analysis in the journal Pediatrics.

And those are just the reported cases, said Dr. Marit Tweet, a medical toxicologist with the Southern Illinois School of Medicine, who led the study.

Cases of kids eating pot products such as candies, chocolate and cookies have coincided with more states allowing medical and recreational cannabis use. Currently, 37 U.S. states permit use of marijuana for medical purposes and 21 states regulate adult recreational use.

Dr. Sam Wang, an emergency medicine physician and toxicologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said he has witnessed that trend play out locally.

“We have continued to see an increase in exposure cases in young children through the years,” when first medical and then recreational cannabis became legal in Colorado, he said.

According to data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, in 2010 there were 16 reported cases of children under five unintentionally ingesting cannabis products, Wang said. In 2021, that number had risen to 179.

Children between the ages of one and three are the most likely to be sickened, he said. While most are ultimately fine and experience symptoms of nausea and drowsiness, in rare cases consuming marijuana edibles has depressed a child’s breathing to the point they needed to be placed on a ventilator.

“For the most part it’s very mild, but if a child is small enough or has ingested enough” it can be dangerous, Wang said. “We’ve had some really sick kids come in.”

Tweet called for greater vigilance by parents and for more laws like those adopted by several states to make pot products — often packaged to look like kids’ candies and snacks — less appealing and accessible to children.

“When it’s in a candy form or cookies, people don’t think of it in the same way as household chemicals or other things a child could get into,” she said. “But people should really be thinking of it as a medication.”

Wang said Colorado has done “a pretty decent job” compared to some other states of passing requirements such as regulating the amount of THC that can be in an edible product, requiring products to come in child-resistant packaging and limiting what can be on the packaging of edibles to make them less attractive to kids. 

He said that more should be done to educate the public about the issue, and that it should be treated in the same way as how to keep alcohol or dangerous chemicals away from kids — put marijuana products up and out of reach or in locked containers and make sure that other people taking care of your kids do so as well, Wang said.

Tweet and her colleagues analyzed reports to the National Poison Data System, which includes the nation’s 55 regional poison control centers. More than half of the children were toddlers, ages 2 and 3, the study showed. More than 90% got the edibles at home.

“They’re the ones starting to explore and to get up and move around,” she said.

Wang said toddlers are particularly at risk because they are old enough to be eating solid food and moving around on their own and are particularly prone to eat food that’s been lying around, especially if it’s sweet.

“If you leave a piece of candy out with TCH, they’re definitely going to get it,” he said.

Of more than 7,000 reports, researchers were able to track the outcomes of nearly 5,000 cases. They found that nearly 600 kids, or about 8%, were admitted to critical care units, most often with depressed breathing or even coma. Nearly 15% were admitted to non-critical care units and more than a third were seen in emergency rooms. Drowsiness, breathing problems, fast heart rate and vomiting were the most common symptoms.

The results are not surprising, said Dr. Brian Schultz, a pediatric emergency physician at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore. He previously worked at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he and his colleagues treated kids who had eaten pot edibles “almost on a daily basis,” he said.

Reports and hospitalizations rose during the last two years of the study, during the COVID-19 pandemic. More children were at home, with more opportunities to find pot treats, Tweet said. With marijuana more widely legal, parents may have felt less stigma seeking help from poison centers and health care providers, she added.

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— Sentinel staff writer Carina Julig contributed to this report

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