Among Colorado residents, the rate was 112 per 10,000 in 2014, compared to 106 in 2013; the difference was not statistically significant.
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According to the study conducted at the emergency department of UCHealth’s University of Colorado Hospital, out-of-towners showing up to emergency rooms for pot-related symptoms accounted for 78 of every 10,000 emergency room visits in 2012.
Kim was finishing his residency in Colorado when he did the study.
“I would say visitors to states with legal marijuana should be aware of side effects of legal marijuana use”, said Kim.
Lead investigator Dr. Howard Kim, an emergency medicine physician at Northwestern Medicine, states in a news release that these findings “may indicate that out-of-state visitors are unprepared for the adverse effects of marijuana use”.
Mike Van Dyke with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment told The Cannabist, it could just be tourists over-doing it on edibles because they can, much like New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd did in her famous trip to Denver.
Overdoing it can have some pretty nasty consequences, including anxiety, hallucinations, high blood pressure and vomiting.
While some of those who needed emergency care after taking edibles or smoking weed came to Colorado specifically to get high legally, others came for business or other reasons.
“People eating marijuana products often don’t feel any effect immediately, leading them to eat another edible”.
Visitors to University of Colorado Hospital from outside the state with marijuana complaints climbed from 85 per 10,000 visits in 2013, to 168 per 10,000 in 2014, the first year of retail marijuana sales in the state, the study found.
He thinks that sellers have been doing a good job of educating the customers, and the three retailers Shots contacted, including The Giving Tree of Denver, all said they provide literature from the department of health including the Good To Know materials.
For the new report, Monte and his colleagues reviewed billing codes for the emergency department at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora.
Experts say the results show more education is needed for consumers at pot retailers.
“We noticed an increasing number of patients coming to the ER who seemed to be from out of town and we made a decision to look at the data to see if that was the case”, said Kim.
Among Colorado residents, the rate of emergency-room visits possibly related to cannabis use did not change significantly between 2013 and 2014. In the past year, Colorado health officials have been establishing responsible vendor programs that train “budtenders” or cannabis sellers to give reliable information about dosing and side effects. “So it’s important for inexperienced users to know the effect for ingested marijuana is delayed compared to smoked or inhaled marijuana”.
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In states considering marijuana legalization, he said, policymakers should think of campaigns to educate the public and anticipate this as an issue.
