Marijuana users experiencing ‘acute illness’: Colorado ER docs

Legal weed is making people sick. To put it bluntly.

For over a decade, physicians have been aware of a little-known potential side effect of long-term, chronic use of marijuana. Called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS, it comes on suddenly in users who might have smoked for years without having any problems.

Then, without warning, CHS sufferers experience severe nausea and vomiting after lighting up, getting only modest relief when they hop in a scalding-hot bath or shower.

Until recently, the condition was thought to be confined to a small group of unlucky patients. But now that pot has been legalized in a number of places, that theory is going up in smoke.

A new study of emergency room visits at a large hospital in Colorado shows that between the years of 2012 and 2016, nearly 10,000 people came in for “acute illness” related to the use of marijuana. The vast majority of these visits were attributable to CHS, making it the leading cause of emergency room visits in the state, the study’s lead author Andrew A. Monte told Business Insider.

“To see that this was a leading reason for people coming to the ER, that was pretty striking,” Monte said about his research, which was published Tuesday in the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Medical Mary Jane has been legal in mountainous state since the turn of the millennium; the amendment that authorized recreational pot use passed in 2012. But CHS is not confined to just to Colorado — a study of New Yorkers, published in January 2018 shows that the sickening syndrome is actually much more common than previously thought.

Researchers polled people who came through the emergency room at Bellevue for issues related to smoking weed. Their sobering findings, published in the journal Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology, revealed that of those users who reported puffing at least 20 days a month, a full third of them had experienced symptoms related to CHS.

“If this is extractable to the general population, approximately 2.75 million (2.13–3.38 million) Americans may suffer annually from a phenomenon similar to CHS,” the study concluded.

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