“He wasn’t my happy child anymore. It was awful.”
That’s how Texas mother Savannah Mallach describes watching her four-year-old son suffer THC poisoning after eating a marijuana lollipop. The child was rushed to the hospital, where he experienced an elevated heart rate and hallucinations before spending the night under medical care.
Adults don’t need THC lollipops. Children don’t know the difference.
That’s a recipe for exactly the kind of poisoning that sent Mallach’s four-year-old son to the hospital.
Marijuana companies continue to manufacture THC-infused lollipops, gummies, chocolates, and other products that look, taste, and feel like ordinary treats. While these products are marketed to adults, their candy-like appearance creates an obvious danger for young children who cannot distinguish a drug from a piece of candy. The result is entirely preventable poisonings like the one that turned Mallach’s family’s life upside down.
Her son’s poisoning is far from an isolated incident. A recent New York State Department of Health report found that emergency room visits for marijuana poisoning among children under five have risen so dramatically since legalization that they now exceed visits for Tylenol, aspirin, and similar pain relievers combined in that age group. Statewide marijuana poisoning visits nearly doubled between 2016 and 2024, while emergency room visits involving children under five increased nearly 40-fold.
The alarming trend has drawn concern well beyond advocacy groups. In response to New York’s latest data, the Times Union Editorial Board argued that lawmakers must do more to protect children from marijuana poisonings, while the New York Post warned that poisoned toddlers are among the “ugly consequences” of the state’s troubled legalization experiment. Together, the editorials reinforce what families like the Mallachs have learned firsthand: when THC products are made to look like candy, young children inevitably pay the price.