Cops say child died from THC gummies. Here’s what experts say about marijuana overdoses

A Virginia woman is facing murder and neglect charges following the death of her 4-year-old son, which authorities said was caused by consuming THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana.

But medical professionals have been dubious of several similar claims in the past.

A grand jury indicted 30-year-old Dorothy Clements on Oct. 17 for the death of her son on May 8, according to a news release from the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office. Two days before he died, the child experienced a medical emergency while at home.

“His condition didn’t get any better and it got to the point where he was on life support, and the family decided to take him off,” a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office told McClatchy News.

Detectives said they later learned the child had eaten a large number of THC gummies, according to the release. The child’s toxicity level showed a high level of THC, which is listed on his autopsy report as the cause of death, according to the spokesperson.

Is it possible to die of a THC overdose?

If the child did indeed die of a THC overdose, it would be one of the first-ever recorded cases.

Despite being used by nearly 50 million Americans at least once in 2019, there are no deaths recorded from the overdose of marijuana, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s website.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse echoes this finding, saying there have been no recorded instances of death from marijuana alone.

Still, a few similar cases have been reported over the years and were largely disputed by the medical community.

In 2015, after an 11-month-old baby died in Colorado, his blood and urine tested positive for marijuana, according to a case study from researchers at the Denver Health and Hospital Authority. Officially, he died of myocarditis, but doctors concluded in their report “this is the first reported pediatric death associated with cannabis.”

It’s very probable the baby had a heart problem before ingesting marijuana, Yasmin Hurd, the director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, told NBC News. “And [the drug] could have been the last straw.”

One of the doctors who authored the report later clarified their findings, telling The Washington Post “we’re not saying definitively that marijuana caused the myocarditis. All we are saying is we didn’t find any other reasons. So we need to study this further.”

At least one medical professional wasn’t so skeptical of the findings, however.

Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told the Post he didn’t think it was impossible that the death could be linked to marijuana.

“Unambiguously, cannabis can accelerate the heart,” he said.

A 2014 study in France supports this claim, as it found marijuana could potentially trigger cardiovascular complications in young people.

In 2019, a Louisiana coroner determined a 39-year-old woman in Louisiana died of a THC overdose, according to WWLTV, a decision that again turned heads in the medical community.

“It looked like it was all THC because her autopsy showed no physical disease or afflictions that were the cause of death,” St. John the Baptist Parish Coroner Christy Montegut told Nola.com. “There was nothing else identified in the toxicology.”

Keith Humphreys, a former adviser at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the outlet that coroners occasionally conclude a drug was the cause of someone’s death if it’s detected in their system and unaccompanied by other clues.

“There’s always some imperfection in these kinds of assessments,” he added.

“We know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively,” Humphreys told Fox5. “So, that means that if the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year.”

In response to the reports of the Louisiana woman’s death, the executive director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative told Insider “there is a theoretical THC limit that could lead to an overdose...but it’s basically impossible to consume a level that high.”

“[A] fatal dose of marijuana would require ingestion of fifteen hundred pounds in fifteen minutes — a physical impossibility for any human, even Snoop Dogg,” wrote David Schmader, author of a book about marijuana.

But while there are no undisputed reported fatalities from marijuana alone, the drug can still pose other risks.

Studies have shown that marijuana consumption can impair coordination and reaction times, which can be dangerous when driving. In addition, research has demonstrated that smoking marijuana frequently can lead to an increased risk of psychosis.

This story was originally published October 21, 2022 at 7:01 AM with the headline "Cops say child died from THC gummies. Here’s what experts say about marijuana overdoses."