Story Archive

Second Hand Smokescreen

One of the facts that marijuana legalization proponents like to point out is that even the federal Drug Enforcement Administration admits there’s never been a single documented death from a marijuana overdose. So when a medical case report published in the journal Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine noted that a child had died in a case “associated” with cannabis in Colorado, where marijuana is legal, headlines blared that the “first marijuana overdose death” had been recorded. Nope. First, the boy was not any sort of pot “user” — he was just 11 months old, and lived in a hotel room with his parents, who admitted they had marijuana when a blood test on the boy found THC, presumably from second-hand smoke. To make things clear after the headlines when viral, Thomas Nappe, one of the two doctors who wrote the report, said it categorically: “We are absolutely not saying that marijuana killed that child.” Nappe has the credentials to know: he’s the director of medical toxicology at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Bethlehem, Pa. The infant was apparently already in poor health; the actual cause of death was myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, and the doctors just wanted to suggest that other doctors consider what relationship, if any, marijuana had in any unusual deaths, Nappe said. (RC/KUSA Denver, Washington Post) ...But hey, let’s keep repeating this faulty conclusion so we can ignore the documentation that fully legal alcohol kills 88,000 people in the U.S. alone — per year.