Since Michigan legalized marijuana more than five years ago, cannabis has become pretty visible in everyday life.
Dispensaries are everywhere, you can get marijuana in the form of candy and baked goods, and the industry is generating billions of dollars every year.
But there’s also growing concern about how that normalization is affecting kids.
A record number of Michigan kids were hospitalized last year for cannabis, according to the state’s poison control center. In the past five years, they received about 1,500 reports of kids under the age of six being exposed to or ingesting CBD, THC, or other cannabis products
While ingesting cannabis products is unlikely to land an adult in the hospital, it's different for kids, said Michigan Public health reporter Kate Wells.
"What happens to them is just very different than when like an adult ingests cannabis," Wells said. "You can have cases where like kids are pretty fine, they get a little sleepy, maybe they're a little out of it. Maybe there's some vomiting too. In rare cases, things that are actually like life threatening."
Those life-threatening symptoms can include seizures and breathing problems.
Michigan Public data reporter Adam Yahya Rayes said that while the number of reports is rising, it isn't clear if that corresponds to an actual increase in the number of kids ingesting cannabis products.
"It's hard to tell if an increase in these reports reflects an increase in the amount that is happening overall, or if it just means that poison control is hearing about more of the cases that are happening," he explained. "If people are more willing to call poison control or, you know doctors and nurses or whoever feel it's more necessary to call them."
One of the families Wells talked to during her reporting were baffled where their young daughter could have gotten cannabis after she landed in the hospital with THC in her blood. They found out that their daughter and other children had found a packet of gummy candy, packaged to look like Sour Patch Kids, at a kids baseball game.
Under Michigan law, marijuana products are not allowed to be marketed or packaged in ways that appeal to children. That means no cartoons and required childproof packaging.
"But in reality," Wells explained "...regulators, industry experts, they told us in our reporting that it is actually really not that hard to get these unregulated products online."
Adding to the difficulty of keeping these products out of the hands of kids are cannabis-based products that fall into a legal gray area, Wells explained. Industrial hemp does not face the same kind of marketing and packaging regulations that marijuana does because it can't get you high. The 2018 federal Farm Bill legalized industrial hemp for use in everything from bioplastics to textiles. But some companies have chemically altered industrial hemp to make it contain higher levels of the kinds of THC that can produce a high for people who ingest it.
"And Michigan recently changed its own state laws to try and address that farm bill loophole," Wells added. "But it's just not really being enforced, like practically speaking."
Hear the full conversation with Kate Wells and Adam Yahya Rayes in the Stateside podcast.
