- Michigan’s poison control center got 387 reports of kids under age 6 ingesting or being exposed to cannabis in 2024, a record high for the state.
- While most kids do well with treatment, poison control data suggest 105 were hospitalized, with 23 requiring critical care.
- Experts say parents need to lock up marijuana products at home. Some local health departments have given away free lockboxes. The industry also points to the increase of unregulated edibles from unlicensed retailers.
Brandon and Sarah Reinkensmeyer were getting a relaxing, child-free weekend away. They were traveling out of state for a friend’s wedding, while Sarah’s mom was home with their two kids in Birmingham, Michigan.
And then, on Saturday, they got a call from the hospital.
“I don’t know if it was a nurse who called, or if it was CPS who called us,” Brandon said. “Because CPS got involved at the hospital.”
Their 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, was sick. She’d come home from her brother’s T-ball game at an elementary school in Troy, eaten an entire box of mac and cheese, and then fallen asleep in the middle of the day.
Now her breathing had slowed, and she “was not really functional, just like kind of out of it,” Brandon recalled her grandmother telling them. Then her grandmother had taken her to the hospital, where they’d discovered Olivia’s blood oxygen was low, too.
Then the hospital asked Brandon the last question he was expecting: “‘Are you aware that your daughter has THC in her system?’”
That made no sense. Brandon and Sarah Reinkensmeyer don’t use marijuana - it’s not in their home. Sarah’s mom, who was watching the kids, doesn’t use it either. So how had Olivia wound up with so much THC in her system that she was being admitted to the hospital?
“We’re like, ‘What are you talking about? This is crazy,’” Brandon said.
More reported pediatric exposure cases, hospitalizations
In the last five years, the state’s poison control center received about 1,500 reports of kids under the age of six being exposed to or ingesting CBD, THC or other cannabis products.
The center’s data suggests more than 400 were hospitalized, and more than 100 reported cases required critical care. A small handful reportedly experienced seizures or had to be intubated.
There are likely many more cases than poison control reports show, because doctors and parents may not call poison control when exposures happen. But poison control often doesn't get blood testing information, so they can't verify whether cannabis was actually involved in every report. And research is mixed on whether marijuana legalization led to increases in cannabis ingestions by kids.
“A lot of people just don't even realize that cannabis can do this to little kids,” said Dr. Meredith Sharp, a pediatric hospitalist at Henry Ford St. John Hospital in Detroit, who says they see multiple kids who’ve ingested cannabis in the ER each month.
“The way they process things is different. They're much smaller. So a dose that you would normally give to an adult…could be really dangerous for a kid.”
When small children find these sweet-tasting products, they can quickly consume multiple adult-sized servings. “Certainly the amount of gummies that's in a pack could be enough for a toxic dose to land a kid in the hospital,” Dr. Sharp said. “But even just like a couple of gummies can honestly be enough.”
The most common symptoms for THC ingestion in kids are lethargy, confusion, poor coordination, nausea, and vomiting, according to a 2022 review published in the Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians. More severe symptoms include abnormally slow heart rates, low blood pressure, seizures, and difficulty breathing.
ER doctors in Michigan say these cases have become increasingly common in recent years.
“We started to see this sort of wave of kids who came in with altered mental status, parents saying they're not acting right, or ‘I can't wake them up,’” Dr. Erica Michiels, an emergency medicine physician and the chair of pediatrics at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, told Michigan Public in November.
“These kids show up looking potentially extremely sick, and really require all of our resuscitative efforts to save their lives,” Michiels said.
One of the challenges of cannabis ingestions in very small children, is that the symptoms may mimic potentially life-threatening illnesses that doctors need to urgently rule out, often through invasive testing. That can include CT scans, which expose a child’s brain to radiation, in order to rule out brain bleeds, Michiels said, or lumbar punctures (also known as spinal taps) that take a sample of the fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord, “to make sure we’re not dealing with meningitis.”
“Parents also don't come in very often volunteering that they think their child just ate an entire pack of edibles,” Michiels said. “So we're often working with parents who are afraid to tell us what's wrong. And oftentimes they themselves don't know, because there's a lot of information out there that's incorrect about the effects of marijuana.”
Parents are often scared when they come in, Henry Ford’s Sharp said, because they don’t know what’s wrong with their child. And when they realize it’s edibles, “a lot of them feel very guilty,” she said. “The good news is that these kids do become well again. And after the effects wear off, all the kids that I've seen in my experience, go on to live happy, healthy lives afterwards.”
Loopholes, lack of enforcement allows cannabis marketed to kids
That was thankfully the case for the Reinkensmeyers’ daughter, Olivia. After a difficult night in the hospital (where she told her parents she had “really bad dreams,”) Olivia came home and recovered fully.
She told her parents that at her brother’s T-ball game, she and three other younger children had eaten a bag of candy that “tasted funny.”
As the oldest, Olivia oversaw matters so no one felt deprived. “They went to go sit and play picnic or tea time or whatever it was, and Olivia’s making sure that everyone got” the same number of gummies, Brandon said. “Like, ‘Hey, you get one, you get one, I get one,’ kind of thing.”
Brandon started calling the other parents on the T-ball team: who was on snack duty? Had anyone seen anything?
One of the parents found an empty bag in the trash they’d collected at the game, Brandon said: marijuana edibles in packaging that looked just like a popular candy.
“It looks exactly like Sour Patch Kids,” Brandon recalled. “It's really scary, actually, how crazy it looks.” He wondered: “How in the heck is this even legal in the state of Michigan?”
Technically, it’s not.
State regulations require Michigan’s $3 billion-dollar marijuana industry to use child-resistant packaging and prohibit the sale of edibles that look like candy. But industry experts and regulators say it’s still too easy to buy copycat candy products from unlicensed online retailers, and there’s minimal enforcement of unlicensed marijuana products sold at local smoke shops, gas stations and liquor stores, some of which allegedly sell to minors.
Last year, Detroit Public Schools released a public letter to lawmakers about a surge in “the proliferation and consumption of marijuana edibles and vape pens” at school. The letter included a photo, provided by the Detroit Police Department, of edibles packaged to look like familiar candy brands: Skittles, Nerds rope, Jolly Ranchers, Sour Patch Kids and Starbursts.
“When you see something like that, you know it's illegal, because that's not sanctioned by the state,” said Kim James, director of Detroit’s Office of Cannabis Affairs.
James says her own staff noticed unregulated products being sold at a liquor store near city hall.
They bought a bag of strawberry banana “Indica Clusters,” containing six gummies with a total of 600 mg THC, the psychoactive component. That’s 400 mg more than the 200 mg total maximum THC concentration the state allows in a single marijuana-gummy container.
Part of the issue is the “gray market” that’s sprung up since the 2018 U.S. farm bill legalized industrial hemp, a type of cannabis that has a delta-9 (a type of THC) concentration of not more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis. Industrial hemp has a wide variety of uses, from bioplastics to textiles.
Since then, some industrial producers have chemically altered hemp to have higher concentrations of other types of THC, like delta-8 or delta-10. That means these products can still get you high, but producers argue they’re technically legal under the federal farm bill.
“The market for these products has exploded,” said John Fraser, the lead Michigan cannabis industry attorney for Dykema law. “These are big companies that are out there, and they’re making money and they’re basically unregulated.”
In response, Michigan expanded its definitions of marijuana in 2021 to include all types of THC, in an attempt to regulate these products. “But right now, we kind of have this disjointed framework,” Fraser said. “And without any kind of organized enforcement, these products continue to be sold in Michigan.”
The Michigan Cannabis Regulatory Agency has proposed draft rules that would provide “even more stringent potency requirements,” said Robin Schneider, executive director of the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association.
“And I think the majority of our members do support that. Because they don't want accidental overdoses. But we can only do what we can do in our market. The enforcement needs to happen on the unlicensed hemp products that are being shipped into our state from other states that don't have all of the safety requirements. And that's a big point of frustration for us.”
Adults should lock up edibles to keep away from children
Even legal marijuana edibles can still look and taste like candy to little kids who find them at home, a friend’s house, or school, experts say. Some local health departments in Michigan have given away free lockboxes and lock bags as part of public awareness campaigns to encourage parents to lock up all marijuana in the home.
When a story appeared on WXYZ news about the Reinkensmeyers’ daughter and the other children at the T-ball game, the comments on social media either downplayed the kids’ symptoms or blamed the parents , Brandon and Sarah said.
“We weren't even there when it happened, and we weren't sure even how it happened,” Brandon said. “And then just minimizing the effects of THC on anyone, and [saying] that that would never happen, this is exaggerated. And it was just awful.”
The dismissal was what rankled most, Brandon said. “How can you think this? These are children. Their bodies are very different than adults. And do you even know what that means, like a 40 pound [child] to [consume] 20mg [of THC?] That's staggering.”
But Sarah says it also got posted on a local mom’s page, and the parents there were really grateful for the heads up, saying they didn’t realize kids could get so sick.
Data reporting contributed by Adam Yahya Rayes.
