Cannabis poisoning in young children increased nine times after legalization | Hacker News Reader

Cannabis poisoning in young children increased nine times after legalization

medicalxpress.com

26 pointspseudolus40 comments

Not to be a buzzkill, but maybe we should restrict the forms of edibles available. Dispensaries in Canada have gummies, chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, nut clusters and all sorts of other snacks in edible form. Some come in bright attractive packaging. Edible oils, capsules, etc. are not so easily confused with food.

I don’t disagree with you but couldn’t you make the same argument with alcohol? There are plenty of alcoholic drinks with colorful packaging that taste like candy.

No you can't chug a 5th like candy, you could accidently eat a 1000mg+ of THC gummies.

It's different in that a child likely won't drink enough alcohol to be poisoned whereas just one or two delicious gummies would tranquilize an elephant.

Being too high is not the same as being poisoned.

I wonder how Canada defines 'cannabis poisoning' since any child would pass out long before reaching a dosage that could result in injury or death.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcopop They're restricted somewhat in some countries.

But some of these packages look exactly like candy, often mimicking the packaging of popular brands.

Seems reasonable, I suppose you could say similar things about hard cider and other camouflaged alcohol, which the cynic in me says are actually intended to attract teens before they are of age...

I don't think alcohol needs help attracting teens. Tell them they aren't allowed to have it and they will want it and only it.

Go shopping with any child and tell them they can't have something - and they will want it and only it.

Honestly, I think this goes for adults too, perhaps even to a greater degree. Not trying to be glib. Everyone think they themselves are worth more than others, that the rules don’t apply to them.

Yeah but adults like shiny colorful things too. It's kinda human nature, and it's a bummer that it might attract younger folks. But really, when I was younger, everybody was drinking whatever they could steal from their parents liquor cabinets. Having boring labels, and shitty taste didn't stop anybody. We never really went to the liquor isle in the store to see what was available and pick out what looked the best. You got what you could get. When you're that age, you can't be picky and choosy, and you're not drinking for the flavor, you're drinking to get drunk.

IMHO you can tell quite easily that you're drinking hard cider instead of apple juice, which is not the case with edibles.

So the ED visits increased by nine times, but what about usage and availability? Did they scale at the same rate?

There still needs to be a look at the packaging, safety systems, etc., but ignoring the scaling of usage and availability skews the number.

Somewhere in the US, a child accidentally shoots someone every day.

They can't keep getting away with it.

Only a good child with a gun can stop the bad child with a gun.

I saw this exact exchange of comments on Reddit yesterday.

Sometimes there's nothing insightful to be said and grotesque is all what remains.

“The average age of these children was three years, nine months.”

Pretty sure I ate cat food off the floor at that age

I ate ants... good to hear none of those kids died because its extremely safe to consume in large quantities. I expect 100% recovery for all of them when prescribed 500-1000g of cheetos.

That reminds me of College Humor. "Tide CEO: You Gotta Stop Eating Tide Pods" and "JUUL CEO: No More Advertising to Kids"

Why exactly is cannabis packaged and flavored like snacks for young children?

Isn't it obvious that doing so will increase the chance that kids eat it when they shouldn't?

> Why exactly is cannabis packaged and flavored like snacks for young children?

Fwiw, I have a strongly contrasting opinion here. I'm 30 years old, hardly a young child, and I still like the taste of candy and fruit juice. In a parallel universe somewhere, a version of you is advocating for banning Mimosas because its juice contents obviously increases the chances that kids will drink it when they shouldn't. Can't we just admit that adults like sugar too and knock off all this "sugar means targeting young children" crap?

That's why I wrote flavor and packaging. For example, consider this product:

https://jumpingideas.com/portfolio-item/gummy-bear-cannabis-...

It shows two colorful children's plush toys on the package. The whole design screams "children's candy" to me.

You're showing packaging that appeals to me. I'm not a child. Must all the things I want to buy be sold in drab packaging with dull colors merely because I turned 25?

As someone that started smoking cigarettes at 15 because they had all these fruity flavors I wanted to try, screw what appeals to you.

Those characters are Care Bears, more likely to be relevant to genX and millennials (because of their popularity in the 80s) than young children. Seems to me like they're marketing nostalgia here.

Worth pointing out that the two points are not mutually exclusive.

Has parental responsibility been thrown by the wayside?

Why are parents letting their kids do this stuff?

Struck me while walking my dog and finding a trampled bag of medical gummies at the park.

The packaging looks like 'regular' candy, and the flavors are candy flavors. The dog wanted to eat 'em and of course a child would, too.

As a former stoner, I never understood the idea of edibles as anything other than oil capsules.

What kind of adult wants to wake up, take a loosely distributed thc infused nerds rope, and brush their teeth?

When you increase freedom you decrease safety.

It's very sad but there's some statistical line that you cross when it becomes a public safety issue worth making laws for versus unfortunate side effect.

Nothing is perfect. I'm not sure what that line is.

Poisoning? That's a bit bold. Can't take seriously a study with an agenda.

If someone gets hospitalized (40% of the cases with edibles were - probably due to inadvertently consuming many doses at once), it seems appropriate to call it "poisoning" even if a fatal result is not expected.

When my dog was poisoned with rat poison, it didn't die. It just felt really miserable for several days.

Poison doesn't mean "death", it also includes multiple days of misery. Of course some poisons can kill you, but others are just miserable (but survivable).

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Typical Rat poison in the USA is also treatable with Vitamin K1 pills, lowering the misery the dog feels.

Rat poison can most certainly kill a dog, and at lower doses still cause severe symptoms like seizures and paralysis. For many dogs even just a few milligrams of rat poison can be fatal.

Rat poison _can_ kill a dog, but it certainly isn't designed to.

https://www.merckvetmanual.com/toxicology/rodenticide-poison...

Bromethalin is chosen as a rat poison (rather than other poisons) because you have a chance to save your dog (or your neighbor's dog) if it eats the poison. Its slow enough moving that it won't instantly kill your pets.

In either case, the dog won't have a pleasant time at all. It'd be "poisoned", seizures and paralysis of course, or limp hind legs, etc. etc.

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My overall point is that even "poisonous poisons", like rat poison (bromethalin) isn't a death sentence. Ideally, you want to get the dog treated ASAP, but if it were in a low-enough dosage, it could be a week (!!) before the dog shows symptoms.

Or you know, it could be 4 hours. Hard to say.

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Cannabis is clearly a "lesser poison", even compared to rat poison / bromethalin (which itself is lesser than cyanide). I think children who are going to the emergency room to be diagnosed with poisoning (even if they aren't at risk of "death"), is certainly a "poisoning event". Just not a poison with deadly risk.

Well yeah, it's rat poison. If it was intended to kill dogs, they'ed call it dog poison.

That a poison has some minimum dosage or can potentially be prevented from causing harm with proper intervention is irrelevant. The same could be said for cyanide. The fact is that there is some dosage that can cause serious harm without proper intervention.

My point is that rat poison is a serious risk to dogs. Technically anything that chemically causes undesired side effects is a poison, but colloquially we tend to distinguish between things that are dangerous and things that are merely unpleasant. Rat poison is firmly in the first category, cannabis is in the second.

>Poisoning? That's a bit bold. Can't take seriously a study with an agenda.

My daughter got into the dust of ant poison, so I called poison control. They said that the chemical was pretty inert to kids - she might have a nasty poop, but that was it. It was still poison

Is it poisoning as in you are going to die? No. But I took so many edibles one time that I was legit hallucinating and was convinced I did permanent brain damage. It was scary. I can easily see why people would go to the hospital if they didn't realize they ate edibles.

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