 Smoking marijuana can create respiratory problems, and so vaporized cannabis is one alternative, as I talked about before. But what about eating it? Vaping is likely less harmful than smoking, and marijuana addables are another alternative, but may carry increased risks to children and increased risks of overdosing. I'd add a third risk to that, and that's pets. Once the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado, addables comprise almost half of total cannabis sales, and a significant correlation was found between the rise in use and the rise in marijuana toxicosis cases at veterinary hospitals, contributing, they think, to two dog deaths in the state. Thankfully, there have been no reported deaths among children from marijuana exposure, though some have ended up on life support, as an edible marijuana overdose can lead to severe respiratory depression. Colorado regional poison control cases did increase significantly after recreational pot became legal, and at a higher rate than the rest of the United States, which is one reason the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to oppose legalization. In the very least, they shouldn't be packaged like this. Some states have since banned selling marijuana-infused candy with that kind of imagery, but to play it safe, maybe we shouldn't be making cannabis candy at all. To put this in perspective, though, the Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center reported thousands of kids in Colorado requiring treatment after accidental ingestion of things like cosmetics and vitamins compared to the relatively few cases involving marijuana addables. And you want to talk about poisoning deaths? How about alcohol, whereas deaths attributed to marijuana are few and far between, though there have been a few. The problem is that you may not feel an effect from addables for an hour or two after consumption, and so you don't know how much to take and may then over-consume after an hour since you haven't felt anything yet. But it takes like three hours for cannabis compounds to peek in your bloodstream, compared to just like 10 minutes when you smoke it, and at least that first full hour to really feel much. That's what happened right after legalization in Colorado, and 19-year-old died after consuming a marijuana cookie. He had one piece, twiddled his thumbs for 30 to 60 minutes, didn't feel anything, so ate the rest of the cookie. Two and a half hours later, he jumped to his death off a fourth-floor balcony. A month later, a second guy apparently went psychotic and fatally shot his wife while she was calling 911 for help. A common story for these kinds of cases was eating the recommended serving side, feeling nothing, and so then decided to eat the rest, ending up restrained in the psych ward, complaining that they're God, or mutilating themselves because friends wanted their energy back. The marijuana industry responded by basically blaming the victim, saying, look, no one buys a bottle of Jim Bean and thinks they should consume it all in one sitting. Yeah, but people do expect to be able to eat a whole cookie. I mean, who eats just one-tenth of a cookie? I mean, you could look at other over-the-counter products. There's specific labeling as to dosing and warnings. It seems odd that edible cannabis was not held to the same standard as a bottle of Tylenol. In 2016, Colorado regulators did enact new rules for labeling edibles, including their THC content right on the labels. How accurate are those labels, though? We didn't know until they were put to the test. Of 75 products purchased, involving 47 different brands of edibles, only 17% were accurately labeled, with about 1 in 6 came within 10% of the labeled value. The greatest likelihood of obtaining more than you bargain for products was in Los Angeles, where Seattle seemed to tend to overinflate their labels. It's hard to study marijuana of any kind due to illegality, but based on 100,000 tweets about edibles, most people, it seems, expressed a positive opinion for what it's worth. One unexpected benefit arose in a focused group of teens on marijuana edibles. Several students in high school, it seemed, were eager to learn how to cook.