The case report was published in the journal Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine and is co-authored by a pair of doctors at the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center, which is housed at Denver Health.
The doctors behind the case report, Doctors Thomas Nappe and Christopher Hoyte, worked on the baby’s care as part of their duties at the regional poison control center. They claim that damage to the child’s heart muscle, which was listed as the boy’s cause of death, was brought on by ingesting marijuana. This is the first news story in which either of the doctors publicly discussed the case that was published in a medical journal in March of this year.
“The only thing that we found was marijuana. High concentrations of marijuana in his blood. And that’s the only thing we found,” Hoyte said. “The kid never really got better. And just one thing led to another and the kid ended up with a heart stopped. And the kid stopped breathing and died.”
The case report makes what amounts to a very bold statement in the scientific world, “As of this writing, this is the first reported pediatric death associated with cannabis exposure.”
If correct, the phenomenon Dr. Hoyte claims to have documented would remain the only time a marijuana overdose is known to have caused a human death.
Other doctors are deeply skeptical of the strong language used in the report.
“That statement is too much. It’s too much as far as I’m concerned,” said Dr. Noah Kaufman, an emergency medicine specialist based in Northern Colorado. “Because that is saying confidently that this is the first case. ‘We’ve got one!’ And I still disagree with that.”
It’s widely accepted as fact that marijuana overdoses are not fatal. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration fact sheet on pot says simply that “no death from overdose of marijuana has been reported” and the National Institutes of Health says there is “insufficient evidence” to link THC overdose to fatalities.
The claim that an overdose death happened in Colorado has the potential to change the way people think about the steady march toward marijuana legalization in the US. (ontinueReading
Further Reading - Washington Post: The truth behind the ‘first marijuana overdose death’
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