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 Recreational marijuana became available in Colorado in 2014, and
three other states now allow recreational use, the study authors
point out in JAMA Pediatrics.
Officials had hoped that the child resistant packaging requirements
that were part of the recreational marijuana law “might blunt any
potential increase” in accidental exposures in children, but the
increase was more dramatic than expected, said senior author Dr.
Genie Roosevelt of the Denver Health and Hospital Authority.
“These unintentional exposures and health care visits are
preventable,” she told Reuters Health by email.
Data from a children’s hospital and a regional poison control center
showed that between 2009 and 2015, 62 kids under age 10 were
evaluated at the hospital and 163 calls were made to the poison
control center related to recreational marijuana. Half the kids were
under age three.
For every 100,000 children in the state, marijuana related hospital
visits rose from about one to two over time. There were nine
pediatric exposures reported at the poison control center in 2009
and 47 in 2015. Half of known exposures involved an edible product.
That’s a faster increase than was happening in the rest of the U.S.,
the authors write.
Most of the time, the marijuana came from family or friends.
Half of kids stayed in the hospital less than 11 hours, and tended
to have symptoms like drowsiness, agitation and vomiting, though
four kids also experienced breathing difficulty known as respiratory
depression.
“Marijuana exposures in young children have resulted in respiratory
compromise requiring the use of a ventilator and intensive care unit
admission in a handful of cases,” Roosevelt said.
Though no one under 21 can buy, possess or use recreational
marijuana in Colorado, edible products that look like regular baked
goods or candy may attract young children, she said.
“Making these products less attractive may be effective in reducing
ingestions in young children,” she said.
Colorado just passed a bill, effective July 1st, prohibiting edible
marijuana products that might be enticing to a child, she added.
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“Whenever there’s a new drug introduced into the market, there are
increased hospitalizations associated with it from unintentional
exposures in kids,” said Dr. Andrew A. Monte at the University of
Colorado Denver-Anschutz Medical Center, who was not part of the new
study but works with many of the authors.
The overall number of cases in Colorado is still small, but these
exposures should really never happen, he told Reuters Health by
phone. And the results of this study may not reflect some changes
made to child-resistant packaging in 2015, he added.
“Ten percent of the population in Colorado uses marijuana daily, and
only about 30 percent of those people regularly use edible products,
which is a pretty small percentage overall yet accounts for 50
percent or more of pediatric exposures,” Monte said.
Edible products can be useful in some medical applications, but
recreationally, it’s not necessary to have marijuana products that
“look like KitKat bars,” especially when a single serving may be one
tenth of a cookie as most edibles are very potent, he said.
In the meantime, as with any other household chemicals, recreational
pot in the home should be kept out of reach of kids and protected
with child locks, he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1adWrco JAMA Pediatrics, online July 25, 2016.
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