The Albany Times Union editorial board spent this week conceding an argument it watched unfold in its own opinion pages. In a July 16 editorial responding to a new state Department of Health report, the board wrote that opponents of legalization “warned during the debate over legalization that edible cannabis products resembling candy or snacks could end up in children’s hands,” and then delivered the four words we have waited five years to read: “Those warnings proved prescient.”
The numbers behind that admission are staggering. Child cannabis poisonings in New York have doubled since 2016. Emergency visits for cannabis poisoning among children younger than five rose nearly 40-fold over the period studied. Cannabis poisoning is now the leading poisoning diagnosis resulting in pediatric hospital admissions in the state. New York’s health commissioner, Dr. James McDonald — a pediatrician for 36 years — put the acceptable number plainly: “It should be zero.”
None of this was unforeseeable. It was foreseen publicly, in writing, with dates attached.
The candy warning
On March 5, 2019 — two full years before the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act passed — SAM President Dr. Kevin Sabet wrote in the very same Times Union: “THC-based gummies, candies and sodas are colorful and marketed to attract young eyes.” He warned that today’s marijuana “isn’t your Woodstock weed,” with potency reaching levels many times stronger than anything lawmakers grew up around, and urged Albany “to slow down and consider the costs” before running a “massive social experiment” on New Yorkers. He returned to the same pages in February 2020 with a commentary titled “Cannabis isn’t harmless, and it shouldn’t be commercialized.”
The 2026 editorial describes the result: children ingesting “gummies, chocolates and other cannabis products that resemble treats they see in grocery and convenience stores,” and clinicians left flat-footed, mistaking cannabis poisoning in small children for stroke and other serious illness.
The child-poisoning warning, delivered to the Legislature itself
This one was not buried in an op-ed page. On February 23, 2021 — weeks before the MRTA passed — Dr. Sabet submitted testimony to New York’s Joint Legislative Budget Hearing quoting the National Academies of Sciences directly: “In states where cannabis use is legal, there is increased risk of unintentional cannabis overdose injuries among children.” The testimony warned those injuries “would translate to real costs.”
The Legislature had that document in hand when it voted yes.
The illicit market warning
The same 2021 testimony devoted an entire section to a claim legalization advocates ridiculed at the time: “Legalization will reinforce, not diminish, the black market for marijuana.” It cited Oregon, where only 30 percent of marijuana transactions were captured by the legal market, and Ontario, where roughly 80 percent of sales remained illicit after legalization.
Five years later, the Times Union editorial board writes that “illicit cannabis stores flourished for years while regulators struggled to launch the legal market,” and that “the state’s enforcement efforts continue to be outpaced by the illicit market.” The editorial even concedes that hospital data cannot distinguish whether poisoned children ingested licensed products, illicit marijuana, or intoxicating hemp — an enforcement failure we predicted in detail.
The final warning, on signing day
On March 31, 2021, the day Governor Cuomo signed the MRTA, Dr. Sabet’s statement was unequivocal: “Even if you believe in the rights of adults to smoke a joint, this is a very bad bill.” He warned it would exacerbate the state’s drug crisis and expose more children to high levels of THC that damage developing brains. That same month, SAM Executive Vice President Luke Niforatos warned in a published column that legalization delivers not personal freedom but “a massive addiction-for-profit Big Tobacco 2.0 industry hell-bent on addicting our kids,” fueled by candy-flavored products and an illicit market that thrives alongside the legal one.
Nationally, the data has followed the same trajectory: pediatric accidental edible exposures rose 1,375 percent from 2017 to 2021.
The verdict
Give the Times Union credit for honesty and note what its own remedies imply. Stronger enforcement, child-resistant packaging, lock boxes, public education campaigns modeled on car seats and seat belts: each is an admission that New York legalized first and thought about children second. The state is now building, at taxpayer expense and after the fact, the guardrails that opponents begged for before a single legal sale.
The record matters, because a dozen statehouses are being told today exactly what Albany was told in 2019: that the warnings are overblown, that regulation will handle it, that the illicit market will disappear. New York now stands as the controlled experiment. The warnings were specific, public, and correct.
The commissioner is right. The number should be zero. The way to get there is to stop pretending an addiction-for-profit industry can be trusted with our kids.