Jessica Harris’s 15-year-old daughter was walking to her school bus in London, Ky., last month when a classmate offered her a piece of red candy.
The square-shaped sweet seemed harmless at the time to Harris’s daughter. But it turned out it contained a form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating ingredient in cannabis plants, and it sent her to the hospital.
An explosion of products containing THC and similar chemicals—some of them in kid-enticing forms such as candy or gummy bears—is sending children to emergency rooms across the country and has federal and state regulators grappling with how to contain it. Many of these products face little to no restrictions, because their creators obtain their intoxicating compounds not from marijuana but from hemp, which Congress legalized in 2018.
Calls to poison-control centers concerning these newly popular hemp-derived cannabinoids boomed over the past several years, from four in January 2021 to hundreds every month of 2022 and 2023 for which there is data, according to America’s Poison Centers. More than half of those calls concerned children. Reports of adverse events from these products to the Food and Drug Administration have also increased.