Marijuana Edibles Are Driving a Surge in Child Poisonings

A TWO-YEAR-OLD spots a bright, chewy square left out on the coffee table and does exactly what two-year-olds do: eats it. Nothing about the wrapper or the candy colored shape marks it as anything other than a snack, and in a fast growing number of American homes, it isn’t one. Unintentional ingestions of recreational drugs by young children climbed 3,307 percent from 2000 to 2024, and the surge is driven almost entirely by marijuana edibles that arrived on shelves as states legalized cannabis. The children swallowing them are, overwhelmingly, still in diapers.

Over a 25 year span, 41,612 children under 6 were reported to United States poison centers after unintentionally swallowing a recreational drug, most of them just one and two years old. 57.6 percent were under 3, and 95.9 percent involved a single substance, almost always swallowed inside a home.

The numbers come from a retrospective cohort study, published in the peer reviewed journal BMC Public Health, that mined calls logged in the National Poison Data System (NPDS), the same database poison centers feed every time someone dials the national Poison Help line and that the CDC monitors daily for signs of a public health threat. Toddlers dominate the count for reasons any parent recognizes: at that age, mobility outpaces judgment, and everything within reach eventually goes in the mouth. Toddlers also imitate adults with unnerving accuracy, which researchers suspect adds another route into the medicine cabinet or the coffee table. None of that alone explains why the numbers only started climbing hard after 2013.

Most of these encounters end without lasting harm. But five percent counted as major, meaning symptoms were life threatening or left lasting disability, and six children died.

All six deaths were among children younger than 3. Being under 3 tracked with a 1.54 times higher chance of a major reaction and a 1.23 times higher chance of landing in a critical care unit than children age 3 to 5, associations the researchers link partly to body size: the same dose lands harder in a smaller body.

Why the Youngest Toddlers Bear the Worst of It

“The recreational drug ingestion rate among children younger than 6 years reported to United States poison centers increased substantially over the study period, with increases especially pronounced for edible marijuana and psilocybin products,” says Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the study’s senior author. Additional prevention efforts, he says, need to reach parents directly, not just policymakers.

Cannabinoids, not opioids or stimulants, are what is actually filling the case files: 84.7 percent of every ingestion in the study. Edible preparations alone made up almost half of all cases, and their rate overtook non-edible cannabis products by 2019 as the edible market itself expanded. The cannabinoid ingestion rate climbed 2,348.9 percent between 2015 and 2024 on its own, while the rate for non-edible cannabis products, still rising, grew a comparatively modest 1,460.4 percent from 2010 to 2024. Rarer categories tell a darker story when they do occur: opioid exposures were 2.60 times, stimulants 2.16 times, and dissociative drugs like ketamine 1.59 times as likely to require critical care as everything else combined. Four of the six deaths in the study involved fentanyl.

What the Fentanyl Cases Reveal About Risk

None of the age or substance comparisons above are adjusted for confounding factors such as household income or supervision, so they describe an association, not a proven cause. A poorer or less supervised household could plausibly track with both younger age and higher exposure, and the study’s own risk ratios cannot separate that possibility out.

The underlying data carry their own limits. Poison center reports rely on whoever calls in describing what happened, so misclassification is possible, and cases where the route of exposure was unknown were excluded entirely, which is how at least two earlier child deaths from cocaine and methamphetamine slipped out of this count. Laboratory confirmation was unavailable for most cases, and the study covers a defined list of drug categories rather than every substance a child might swallow.

“Because almost all exposures in our study occurred in a residence, parent and child caregiver education should emphasize keeping recreational drugs out of the home, or at a minimum, stored up, away and out of sight and reach of children, preferably in a locked location,” says Hannah Hays, medical director of the Central Ohio Poison Center and a co-author of the study. Edibles are a particular problem, she notes, because they resemble ordinary candy or food and often pack several doses into a single package that a small child cannot recognize as anything but a treat. Packaging rules, opaque wrapping, single serving portions, and clearer labeling, sit alongside education as the interventions the authors want tried, and some of that framework already exists: the federal Poison Prevention Packaging Act has required child resistant containers for hazardous household products since 1970, decades before a cannabis edible was a product anyone had to regulate.

Cannabis is not the only frontier moving. Psilocybin containing mushroom products, still a small slice of the total, are rising fast enough in the same data to worry the researchers who logged them, and legalization for both recreational and therapeutic use in more states seems likely to keep expanding what a curious toddler might find on the coffee table.

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