Magic mushroom chocolate…
“Similar to cannabis edibles, if psilocybin products look like candy and/or are labeled like candy, and have no protective packaging…” says Dr. Sudakin… a medical toxicologist…
“When you’re looking at toxicology you’re looking at how much you’re ingesting compared to the patient’s body size,” says Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Johns Hopkins All Children’s hospital… the toxicological risks of overdosing are, thankfully, vanishingly small, but there is danger of risky behaviour when children are unsupervised, and of vivid hallucinations. “Because kids have a smaller body size, the effects that we see on a child are potentially greater.” Martin notes that the effects typically do not require medical treatment beyond observation, except in the event of “significant hallucinations”, in which case the children may require sedation. National Poison Data System shows a modest uptick in children under the age of 12 admitted to poison centres for accidentally ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms: from 12 cases in December 2022 up to 22 in April 2023. (The data does not distinguish between children who consumed whole, dried mushrooms and those who ingested the drugs in candy form.) Of these cases, 91.3% occurred at the patients’ residences. These are not exactly alarming, “think-of-the-children” numbers. (Some may consider 22 cases, in a nation with 50 million-plus children under age 12, “statistically irrelevant”.) None were fatal. Martin notes that psychological risks are actually decreased in children, as their exposure to these drugs is usually accidental and a one-off occurrence. “Generally a limited ingestion, once or twice, would not have significant long-term issues.”
Original Article (The Guardian):
Cartoon packaging and an ‘inconsolable’ high: when magic mushroom chocolate gets into the wrong hands
Artwork Fair Use: Dr. Hans-Günter Wagner
