CT has a problem with cannabis and children. Hundreds of calls to poison control illustrate it

Hartford Courant – Tuesday, February 11, 2025
By Sean Krofssik

Data shows Connecticut Poison Control Center receives 40 to 60 calls a month on average for children 17 and younger who have reportedly inhaled or ingested cannabis in the state.

In all, there have been 668 calls into the Connecticut Poison Center since 2019 with 280 cases of children younger than 6, 110 for ages 6-11 and 278 for ages 12 through 17, data shows.

Dr. Suzanne Doyon, an emergency medicine physician at UConn John Dempsey Hospital and the Connecticut Poison Control Center medical director, said Connecticut is seeing the same trends other states are seeing.

“Edibles are the major issues in that age group,” Doyon said, speaking specifically for ages 6 and younger.

“Because edibles are often manufactured to look like candy, they are attractive to children and children will eat them. We have a bit less of a problem in Connecticut because our edibles are not allowed to have all of the colors of the rainbow,” she said. “They have to be colorless or white.”

Recreational marijuana became legal in Connecticut for those 21 and older on July 1, 2021. When it comes to edibles, the state regulation very specifically says “products cannot appeal to individuals under the age of 21 and can only be in cuboid or spherical forms. Animal shapes or other shapes that may appeal to children are strictly prohibited. Shape and color restrictions apply to all cannabis products, including gummies and other confectionaries.”

Doyon said edibles in Connecticut also must be packaged in a child resistant bottle, and while the two initiatives “have really helped mitigate the problem in Connecticut,” that “it’s still a problem.”

Doyon said that Connecticut law is different from its regulations and implementations in regard to edibles being individually wrapped, and more could be done.

“The law in Connecticut says the edibles should be individually wrapped. The regulations, which follow the law, did not stipulate anything about individual wrapping. I invite you to go to a dispensary and go purchase some edibles and see if they are individually wrapped, which they should be by law,” Doyon said. “Someone somewhere decided not to follow the law. And someone somewhere decided not to enforce the law.”

A spokesperson for the Connecticut Consumer Protection said everything must be packaged and labeled before it arrives at a retail establishment but does not need to be individually wrapped.

“THC limits for edibles are five milligrams per serving, up to 100 milligrams per package,” the spokesperson said. “Servings do not need to be individually wrapped, but they do need to be clearly delineated within the package. For example, a jar of gummies could contain 20 servings of five milligrams gummies where the gummies are not individually wrapped inside the jar, but each piece is clearly identifiable and only contains five milligrams.”

Doyon said while Connecticut requires child-resistant packaging and limited doses, she would like to see individual wrapping for a variety of reasons.

“If you have a little 2-year-old that manages to crack open that bottle and empties the edibles, instead of just picking one up and putting it in their mouth, they are now going to be wrapped in some kind of paper,” Doyon said. “The child will have to unwrap the edible, and all of this is going to take time.”

Doyon said that time is called “discovery time” to give parents or caregivers more of an opportunity to find out what the child has gotten into.

“Also, when they empty the bottle and ingest a number of them, we often don’t know how many are ingested. If there are individual wrappers it gives us a better idea of how many they ingested and how sick the child is going to be,” Doyon said.

“All of these things are beneficial, increasing the discovery time and giving us an opportunity to know how many were ingested,” Doyon said. “This makes it so much easier to treat than parents saying, “We don’t know what happened. He just got into my purse. Which is unfortunately the situation we are in right now.”

A manager at Fine Fettle in Manchester asked that all questions on this topic go to the Department of Consumer Protection because “they regulate all of that and any product sold in the State of Connecticut.”

“I would encourage you to contact the Department of Consumer Protection if you have any questions the legality of cannabis sales in Connecticut,” the manager said. “I’m not going to go back and forth with a reporter about what a doctor supposedly said when the state has all of these resources. We are one of the largest operators of cannabis in the state it was be expected that we would follow the applicable laws.”

Calls and emails to other cannabis retailers were not immediately returned.

Dosages and older children

The Department of Consumer Protection has a detailed guidelines for packaging and storage plans on its website that includes locking it up and keeping it out of the sight of pets and children.

Doyon said edibles in Connecticut are limited to five milligrams of THC, some of the lowest doses in the country, which limits the level of toxicity if one or two have been consumed.

“It doesn’t mean children don’t get somewhat symptomatic from it, but they don’t get hugely symptomatic from it. There are measures in Connecticut that have helped this problem, but it doesn’t mean it’s non-existent,” Doyon said.

Doyon also said Connecticut’s precautionary measures have led to fewer extreme symptoms compared to other states.

Doyon said if a child gets into edibles to call Connecticut Poison Control Center at 1-800-222-1222, and not 911, immediately after the ingestion.

“The children typically are not in a life-or-death situation,” Doyon said. “They rarely need immediate attention. My answer would be to call the poison center. We are very well equipped to deal with this. We get called about this fairly frequently and will give the best advice we can over the phone.”

Doyon said this is change, and an improvement, due to new information about thresholds for children. Four or five years ago, she would suggest every child that gets into an edible should go to the hospital.

“If it’s five milligrams and it’s a big enough child, the child probably is going to be fine. There’s no need to go to the emergency room. But there are variations of this story. If it’s a smaller child. Or it’s two children and we don’t know how much each of the two children got. It happens a lot, believe it or not,” she added. “We have ways to get to the bottom of this and make the safest and best decision for the children.”

Doyon said no one knows if there are long-term effects of cannabis on children 6 and younger at this time.

“It’s a difficult problem to study and no one knows at this stage if one acute large ingestion of a cannabis edible in a child will or will not lead to permanent complications. It’s a question we can’t answer at this time.”

As for older children, Dr. Craig Allen, medical director at Rushford at Hartford HealthCare, said he is seeing children coming through his doors that have vaped or smoked cannabis leading to emergency room visits or psychotic symptoms or cyclical vomiting syndrome. Rushford provides addiction and mental health services.

He said many times they are hallucinating or are delusional.

“Oftentimes it goes away when they stop smoking,” Allen said. “They calm down in the emergency room and it will go away in a day or so. Sometimes it lasts longer and that is very disturbing to the family when you see a kid that has happened to. It’s even more disturbing if and when that kid uses it again.”

He’s said the younger the adolescent the more vulnerable they are to the neuropsychiatric and neurocognitive impact of cannabis.

“It’s really important to get the word out there and try to delay or detour kids from using it. It’s almost like the exact opposite message goes out as far as legalization and the big tobacco kind of push with cannabis. You drive down the freeway in Hartford you know where you can go get cannabis or you know where you can go do some sports betting,” Allen said.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said more could be done to protect children who are ingesting cannabis products.

“Adult-use cannabis is legal and regulated in Connecticut, but we have to do better to protect kids who are getting exposed and getting sick,” he said. “We’re still finding illegal edibles that look like snacks in unregulated shops, and the potency of these bootleg products is higher than we’ve ever seen. Our message has been clear — if you are unlicensed, if you sell untested, unregulated cannabis, if you sell to minors, we will know, and we will hold you accountable.”

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