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Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly hit of reviews on a cutting-edge medical study. I am Perry Wilson. This week we have Rocky Mountain High with a study listed in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which looked at Colorado's emergency department's cannabis exposure rates over a five-year period.[1]
It will be no news to any of you that Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use in 2014, a unique event that made the epidemiologists salivate. We were almost at a randomized trial of potted smoking that you would never have had. Would the state sink into chaos and ruin, or would a flourishing of libertarian capitalism propel it to new heights?
Well, the apocalyptic visions have not arrived. In fact, recent data suggests that marijuana use among teens has declined more sharply in Colorado than in the rest of the United States, which shows you that once your parents started to do something is not cool anymore.
Source: www.samhsa.gov
But according to this study, emergency visits attributable to marijuana increased by a factor of about 3.
Source: Monte AA et al.[1]
The researchers directly examined diagrams of more than 10,000 emergency admissions in a single Colorado urban center to determine the role that the pot had to play in the presentation and what type of pot was to blame. They first screened about 450,000 emergency visits using ICD-9 codes badociated with marijuana, leaving 9973 visits to examine directly.
Republished with permission of Annals of Internal Medicine
So, from the beginning, we have to be careful here. The slight increase in the number of admissions after the 2014 legalization can be explained by the fact that more people were using marijuana, but simply because people admitted it more openly or that providers were more comfortable asking the question, which resulted in increased medical codification.
Where the study becomes really interesting, it is the type of cannabis that has brought people to the emergency room. About 10% of emergency room visits were made by people who ingest so-called "food products".
D & # 39; agreement. For squares like me, cannabis can be obtained in many ways. You can smoke cannabis flowers, which is the standard method, or you can eat foods containing THC or baked cannabis – "food products". Think of brownies. And cubs in gelatin.
Today, 10% of emergency room visits were for edible products, but only 0.3% of cannabis sales in Colorado involved edible products.
Source: Monte AA et al.[1]
This means that food products have been overrepresented in the emergency department by a factor of 33. That's crazy. But that could make sense.
Edible products have a delayed onset of action compared to smoked marijuana – usually 30 minutes compared to 10 minutes. And they stay in the system longer, about 12 hours for edible products, versus 4 hours for smoked marijuana. This means that people might be "buying back" their food because they do not feel it yet, to get into trouble later.
Source: compbadionatecleveland.com
There is another little gem of data in this study.
Source: Monte AA et al.[1]
Of the food-related consumption patients, 41% lived outside of Colorado, compared to only 6.6% of people who did not smoke marijuana. This implies that marijuana tourists, eager to try different forms of pot exposed, could be at the origin of some of these discoveries.
What did we learn? What I remember the most is that edible foods – these adorable gummy cubs filled with THC, salted caramel caramel brownies – are potentially far more dangerous than the old-fashioned joints that were the basis of the consumption of marijuana before legalization.
In other words, when it comes to recreational marijuana, put it in your pipe and smoke it.
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