Legalization of recreational marijuana brings worries about risks of child poisoning

Each day at the Connecticut Poison Control Center (CPCC) brings calls about someone suffering the adverse effects of cannabis poisoning. Most often, those calls involve children, said Dr. Suzanne Doyon, medical director of the CPCC.

“We get calls about this daily. Absolutely,” Doyon said. “There was even a day two weeks ago, where we had five children in different hospitals in the state of Connecticut, all with edible marijuana exposures. Five at the same time—that was a record for us.”

Now that Connecticut has made the possession of recreational cannabis legal as of July 1, Doyon fears that the number of calls to CPCC for cannabis exposures will only increase: “The numbers are going to go up.” Her anxieties are not unfounded; data from poison control centers across the country substantiate Doyon’s predictions.

A new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that regions with legalized recreational cannabis reported higher rates of calls to poison control centers for cannabis exposure than in states where recreational use was illegal.

Read more: https://ctmirror.org/2021/07/19/legalization-of-recreational-pot-brings-worries-about-risks-of-child-poisoning/