A 26-year-old Manitoba mother is warning other parents to keep their marijuana edibles well-hidden after her five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter were hospitalized when they accidentally ate cannabis-infused chocolate.
"Keep it out of reach, hide it well, always have it in a lockbox,” the mother, who wished to remain anonymous, told CTV Winnipeg. “I would never want to know of another parent going through the same thing I did.”
On Feb. 2, Brandon police were called to the woman’s home after the children got their hands on the innocuous-looking chocolate bar which was stored on a top shelf in the family’s kitchen.
“I thought that maybe it would be like how it works through an adult body,” the mother said. “You know, just wait it out and later on they’ll just be hungry and want water and everything. But I was wrong.”
Hours later, she says, the children began showing negative side effects.
"My daughter, she started seizing up and screaming,” she recalled. “And we realized she might have been having a seizure.”
After the mother called 911, the two-year-old, who experienced several seizures, was flown to hospital in Winnipeg and given medication to sedate her. Now off a breathing tube, a CT scan showed no brain damage. The five-year-old vomited twice after eating the chocolate, his mother added, and has since been released from a hospital in Brandon.
While the mother doesn’t know how much the children ate, the entire bar contained 750 milligrams of THC: cannabis’s primary psychoactive ingredient. The woman told CTV Winnipeg that she typically eats just half a square at a time to relax.
The sale of edible products will remain illegal in Canada’s nascent cannabis market until Oct. 2019, at the latest. When it comes to edibles, a draft regulation is proposing a limit of 10 milligrams of THC per package or container.
Brandon police say no criminal charges are expected in the case. Manitoba’s Child and Family Services agency, however, is looking into the incident.
For more, visit CTV Winnipeg.
