A kid's life is hard nowadays. Sometimes, he has to use a desktop computer instead of his second generation iPad to search Wikipedia for the answers to his homework questions. Sometimes, he searches all 3000 available cable channels, and the only thing on is that vintage old people show, Boy Meets World. And sometimes, the stash of brownies he happened upon are laced with marijuana. All he wanted was a snack!
While the former two issues can be counted off as first world problems, the third is apparently a legitimate medical concern in states where laws against THC have been relaxed. See, for the most part, kids know not to go in medicine cabinets. Even if their parents haven't told them a hundred and one times not to go in there, many medicine cabinets are child-proof, and all medicine bottles are. Unfortunately, it's real difficult to childproof those marijuana edibles, especially when they look like cookies. If there is an opposite of childproofing, this is it.
Dr. George Sam Wang of Children's Hospital Colorado started researching pint-sized cases of pot intoxication after having seen an increase in said cases over the last few years. Unsurprisingly, these occurrences began to crop up more frequently after Colorado changed its marijuana laws back in 2009. Since then, 14 children, all under the age of 12, had been admitted to the hospital where Wang works for ingestion of marijuana. Of these 14, eight had consumed medical marijuana (as opposed to the street drugs), and seven had gotten it from an edible. Two ended up in intensive care.
This is crazy depressing, but not necessarily surprising. We all know kids ain't nothing but smaller versions of us, and with pot having increased in potency in the last several years, the effect it'd have on tinier systems is cause for concern.
Enter Michael Kosnett, a really cool dude. He's also a medical toxicologist and associate clinical professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and he and Wang have been working up an idea with Colorado policymakers. Get this: Childproof your pot brownies. At least the ones that are bought and sold on the market. Like grabbing Tylenol off the shelf and knowing you'll have to perform some level of contortion to open it, heading into your pot shop will now mean getting your pot cookies in a cage. Or at least, according to the new signature by Colorado's governor (which went into affect on June 1st), "child-resistant packaging" means only 20 percent of 4-5 year olds can open it in around ten minutes. Plenty of time for a parent to walk in and lie about why the brownies in the back of the freezer are only for grown-ups.
H/T NPR + PicThx Gossipy , National Journal
