The scary trend began before New York State legalized recreational marijuana back in March, going from six children in the NYC metropolitan area poisoned by edibles in 2018, to 32 in 2019 and 127 in 2020, according to regional poison control officials.
“Sometimes that’s in the form of candies and gummies, cookies and brownies. There are lots of forms that are out there,” said Dr. Ethan Wiener, director of pediatric emergency medicine at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone.
Two-thirds of those children are under the age of 5 — and the numbers are on track to be just as high this year.
The numbers are also spiking upstate, and in New Jersey where their poison center reports the number of children 5 and under ingesting edibles more than doubled each year since 2018.
