Your kid is way more likely to be poisoned by crayons than by marijuana

Since the full legalization of marijuana in Colorado, many opponents have tried to skew the statistics to make it seem like marijuana is evil and ruining our kid's lives, when the reality is much less dramatic. A recenty study published that since legalization there has been a major increase in emergency room visits and poison control calls for children ingesting marjijuana, but no one mentions the mortality rate for cannabis remains at 0. In fact, the slight increase in children ingesting cannabis products is common sense when considering the availability of a newly legal product, but no one is comparing it to the number of cases involving alcohol, which is the same number as cannabis, or even tobacco, which is drastically higher than both others. No one is calling for the deregulation of alcohol or tobacco, yet the damage remains much worse from both. There were even 1,683 calls to poison control over crayons in 2014, but no one is concerned about that.

Beyond that, the raw numbers on marijuana exposure are extremely low. Marijuana accounts for only 2.3 of every 1,000 poison control cases for kids 10 and younger in Colorado, according to the JAMA study. At the national level, kids are much more likely to be poisoned by any number of common household products, like diaper cream, toothpaste, or energy drinks, than they are to be poisoned by marijuana.

The interesting number is marijuana, which has the exact same exposure rate for children as alcohol. But politicians generally aren't calling for alcohol to be outlawed in order to protect children. This is at least partly because legal alcohol has been around for forever. We’re comfortable with it. But legal marijuana  is new, and new things are scary.