A Virginia court charged a mom with a felony when her son died after consuming cannabis. Experts say death directly from a THC overdose is unlikely.
Serene SBS/Getty Images
A 30-year-old mom was arrested in the death of her 4-year-old son, who died after consuming cannabis — but experts say they need more information on the case to determine whether THC was the cause of death.
The mother, Dorothy Annette Clements, was indicted by a jury this month in Virginia on charges of murder and child neglect after her son consumed what she said she thought was a cannabidiol, or CBD, gummy, Vice News reported. "Detectives believe the child ingested a large amount of THC gummies. The attending doctor told Detectives that if medical intervention occurred shortly after ingestion, it could have prevented death," police said, according to CNN.
She called poison control after the boy, Tanner, consumed the gummy and was told he'd "be fine" but later noticed he'd become unresponsive, the outlet added, citing a search warrant it obtained. Authorities took him to the hospital, where he was taken to off life support two days later, Vice said.
Virginia's Spotsylvania sherrif's office did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Though the Spotsylvania medical examiner's office told Vice News Tanner died as a result of toxicity from delta-8-tetrahydrocannabinol, a component in cannabis, cannabis experts say they do not think a person can die from simply consuming too much marijuana.
Justin Lewis, the director for the Sacramento division of the California Poison Control System and an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, told Insider he has not seen a child die from a cannabis overdose alone but that children who consume high amounts of THC tend to become sedated or lethargic. Young children have not learned to protect their airway, so if they vomit in a sedated state, they are more likely to choke.
Lewis said that in Tanner's case, there could have been other problems at play — like a preexisting heart condition — that led to the boy's death.
"You'd want to know the circumstances surrounding whatever happened and how the actual clinical course went with the child," Lewis said. "I'm not saying it's not impossible, but I just haven't experienced that myself."
Two poison-control doctors in Colorado said they documented the first known death from a cannabis overdose, in an 11-month-old boy, but other physicians questioned whether the drug directly caused boy's death.
In a case report, the Colorado poison-control doctors said ingesting cannabis caused their patient to develop myocarditis, a rare inflammation of the heart that reduces its ability to pump blood and causes trouble breathing, chest pains, and irregular heartbeats in children.
A variety of viruses, bacterial infections, fungi, parasites, drugs, and chemicals cause myocarditis, according to the Mayo Clinic. The Colorado doctors said an analysis of blood and fluid in the nose, lungs, and spine of the baby did not reveal bacterial or viral infections, but added a caveat that the boy may have been infected before he ingested cannabis.
Dr. Noah Kaufman, an emergency-medicine specialist in northern Colorado, told USA Today that fatalities from myocarditis typically came from infection and that there wasn't sufficient evidence to rule that out as a possibility in the 11-month-old boy's death. The cause of myocarditis is also often unknown by doctors.
Yasmin Hurd, the director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told NBC News the child likely had a preexisting problem with his heart that was triggered by ingesting cannabis — which would mean cannabis did not directly cause his death.
"There's so many things that cause the problem that this poor baby had that we're not even close to saying it was definitively a marijuana overdose," Kaufman said. "Allergies can cause this. What if the kiddo was allergic to the carnauba wax or whatever is in the gummy that's not the marijuana?"
There have been no reported deaths from cannabis ingestion in adults and teenagers, according to the Department of Justice.
The amount of cannabis needed to cause an overdose is impractical to reach, Dr. Jeffrey Chen, the executive director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative, previously told Insider. Chen said a person would need to smoke several hundred pounds of cannabis in an hour to induce toxicity — an amount that would cause the smoker to die of asphyxiation before an overdose.
He added that a person could theoretically overdose by injecting a large amount of THC into their bloodstream but even that might not work.
David Schmader, the author of "Weed: The User's Guide," previously told Insider cannabis itself would likely not kill you because of the way the body reacts to the drug. Cannabis compounds latch on to molecules in the brain that influence memory, cognition, and pleasure, but these molecules aren't found in areas that control breathing. Opioids, on the other hand, kill in high doses by binding to receptors that depress breathing; high doses of alcohol also impair the body's ability to control breathing.
While cannabis itself is highly unlikely to cause death, Lewis of the California Poison Control System told Insider that people do die from falling or injuring themself while high.
