Research finds increase in children exposed to marijuana

Denitra Vigil, 25 years old in March 2011, was charged with misdemeanor child abuse after she brought her son to a Denver-area hospital. His urine tested positive for THC, marijuana’s primary psychoactive compound. Vigil was released on a $10,000 bond.

Vigil is far from the first or last Colorado parent to have a child fall ill after ingesting recreational marijuana. Most incidents play out in the same way: accidental exposure, followed by lethargy that passes within a matter of hours. Longterm effects of such marijuana exposure are understudied, points out the Children’s Hospital of Colorado. More severe injuries to children — seizures, comas and respiratory problems — do rarely occur, often a result of high accidental doses compounded by a child’s small size.

In the five years since the case of the freezer cookies, as a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics demonstrated, similar events have been on the rise.

The researchers, all based in Colorado, predicted that there would be a bump after the Colorado law took effect in 2014, said Genie Roosevelt, a Denver Health Medical Center pediatrician and study author, in an interview with Live Science.

“What we didn’t anticipate,” she said, “is how much it was going to go up.”

For Colorado children younger than 10, hospital visits related to marijuana nearly doubled, when the rate two years before the 2014 legalization was compared with the two years after legalization. Though the increase was large, the actual hospitalization rate is still small. On average, 2.3 children per 100,000 population were hospitalized, up from 1.2 children per 100,000 before recreational marijuana was approved.