Recently, researchers Christopher P. Holstege and Rita Farah unveiled the results of their study on the increase in poison center calls for mushroom consumption. In “Psilocybin Exposures Reported to U.S. Poison Centers: National Trends Over a Decade,” the researchers explored the rising trend of accidental exposure to psilocybin between January 1, 2024-December 31, 2022. Holstege is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics and Farah is a Researcher of Epidemiology, both of which work at the University of Virginia.

Over a 10-year period, there were 4,055 exposure incidents recorded by the National Poison Data System, and 2,667 (65.8%) of those incidents involved adolescents or young adults between 13-25. From this number of people, 1,176 (75.3%) were adolescents, and 797 (72.1%) were young adults. One of researchers’ noteworthy observations was that cases didn’t rise between 2013-2018, but increased after 2019, and tripled in 2022.

Holstege and Farah co-wrote an analysis of their research, which was originally published in The Conversation.

Researchers noted that in May 2019, Denver, Colorado became the first city to decriminalize psilocybin, which was followed shortly after by Oakland, California, in June 2019. This trend continued with various other cities across the U.S., with Santa Cruz, California, in January 2020, Washington D.C. in November 2020, Sommerville, Massachusetts in January 2021, Seattle, Washington in October 2021, and Detroit, Michigan in November 2021. Additionally, Oregon was the first state to decriminalize psilocybin and introduce a legal therapy treatment program in November 2020. This was followed by the state of Colorado in November 2022.

Farah is an epidemiologist, and both of them worked together to identify potential harms. “Part of our job is to track public health risks related to poisons and to create efforts to prevent them,” the researchers wrote. “We are both concerned about the increase in calls to poison control centers related to psilocybin.”

However, the information collected by the National Poison Data System covers calls from across the country, making it impossible to know where exactly the poison calls came from.

The data shows that a majority of the reported calls between both adolescents and young adults resulted in the need for medical attention at a hospital or treatment facility. A majority of these cases included people who were experiencing “hallucinations, delusions, agitation, rapid heart rate, and confusion.”

Holstege and Farah expressed their overall concern for youth based on their observations. “Our findings correspond with a review of more than 30 studies that demonstrates a similar rise in acute cannabis poisoning among children and adolescents beginning after marijuana was legalized in 1996,” the researchers concluded. “We find this particularly alarming, since the states that legalized and cities that decriminalized psilocybin don’t allow anyone under 21 to use it or buy it. This suggests young people are getting it illegally.”

A study recently published in the Drug and Alcohol Dependence journal shows that there has also been an increase in law enforcement seizures of psilocybin over the past few years as well. “We found that the number of shroom seizures and the total weight of shrooms seized annually increased through 2022, and the greatest weight of shrooms seized was in the West,” said study co-author Joseph J. Palamar told High Times. Out of 4,526 seizure reports between 2017-2022, the numbers increased from 402 in 2017, to 1,396 in 2022.

While it’s clear that illegal mushroom cultivation and sales needs to be reduced in order to reduce access for adolescents and young adults, the legal psilocybin industry is struggling. Oregon’s psilocybin therapy treatment service program just passed its one-year mark, but has encountered challenges such as limited customers, partially due to high prices and advertising restrictions. Less than a year into its business, one psilocybin treatment center called The Journey has already closed up shop.

Across the U.S., researchers continue to study psilocybin to determine its effectiveness as a treatment for many medical conditions. One study that was published in Clinical Case Reports earlier in June showed that both psilocybin and MDMA can be beneficial in treating symptoms of long-COVID, also called longhauler’s. Sufferers of this condition usually experience anxiety, depression, headaches, and struggles with cognition.

Also in June, University of California, Berkeley announced that it will be embarking on a study to observe how psilocybin affects human perception. It’s the first psilocybin study that UC Berkeley is conducting using human subjects. “We have this incredible opportunity to characterize the psychedelic experience in real time—while it’s happening—using modern neuroimaging methods,” said UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics director, Michael Silver. “Understanding the actions of psychedelics at a neuroscientific level will generate insights into how they’re working as medicines and will hopefully help us develop more effective treatments for mental health disorders. It will also shed light on some of the fundamental mysteries of the human brain, mind and consciousness and how they relate to each other.”

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Newly released data published in last month’s issue of the Journal of Addiction Medicine concluded that marijuana treatments for young people have declined following legalization.

The data, presented by researchers at Temple University, “were extracted from the Treatment Episode Dataset—Admissions and used to calculate trends in the number and proportion of criminal justice referrals” for cannabis use disorder treatment. They sought to investigate “whether the proportion of referrals to cannabis use disorder (CUD) treatment from the criminal justice system declined among adolescents (aged 12–17 years) and young adults (aged 18–24 years) following state recreational (adult use) cannabis legalization in the United States between 2008 and 2019.” And they said that difference-in-differences analysis [used to measure a cause and effect of a certain policy] “was used to estimate the effect of recreational legalization on the state-level proportion of criminal justice referrals as a share of all admissions.”

The researchers said that, nationwide, “the number and proportion of adolescent and young adult criminal justice referrals to [cannabis use disorder] treatment declined over the study period.”

“The proportion of young adult criminal justice referrals declined significantly more rapidly after recreational legalization as compared with before (β = −0.045; 95% confidence interval, −0.079 to −0.010; P = 0.01),” the researchers wrote. “Among adolescents, the trajectory of decline in the proportion of criminal justice referrals did not change significantly following recreational legalization (β = −0.033; 95% confidence interval, −0.073 to 0.008; P = 0.11).”

The researchers concluded that their results “indicate that the proportion of referrals to CUD [cannabis use disorder] treatment from the criminal justice system fell following recreational legalization in the United States among young adults, likely due to post-legalization declines in cannabis-related arrests,” as quoted by NORML’s write-up of the data.

“The decline in the proportion of young adult criminal justice referrals to [cannabis use disorder] treatment following recreational legalization is likely due to falling cannabis-related arrests. Although cannabis criminalization may result in court-mandated CUD treatment for some young adults without CUD, the decline in CUD treatment admissions during a period of increasing CUD risk factors associated with recreational legalization represents a key health concern. Promoting screening and other CUD treatment referral sources, such as through primary care, may be warranted,” they concluded.

The findings represent a welcome development for legalization advocates, who have long contended that the end of prohibition would free up resources in the criminal justice system.

NORML’s Deputy Director Paul Armentano said that most people “arrested for violating marijuana possession laws do not require mandatory drug treatment, and historically, these referrals were provided primarily to divert people away from the criminal justice system.”

“In addition to ending tens of thousands of needless low-level marijuana arrests, cannabis legalization is also freeing up space in drug treatment centers for those people who truly need it,” Armentano said in a statement on the findings.

Marijuana legalization is still in its infancy in the United States, and researchers are continuing to learn more about the social and political outcomes of the policy reform. 

A long-term study released earlier this year found that the legalization of marijuana is not associated with drug abuse.

The study looked at various sets of twins (more than 4,000 individuals total) to examine the effect of living in states that permit recreational cannabis.

Although it was not linked to substance abuse disorder, the researchers did find that it often resulted in increased pot use.

“In the co-twin control design accounting for earlier cannabis frequency and alcohol use disorder (AUD) symptoms respectively, the twin living in a recreational state used cannabis on average more often, and had fewer AUD symptoms than their co-twin living in an non-recreational state. Cannabis legalization was associated with no other adverse outcome in the co-twin design, including cannabis use disorder. No risk factor significantly interacted with legalization status to predict any outcome,” they wrote.

“Recreational legalization was associated with increased cannabis use and decreased AUD symptoms but was not associated with other maladaptations,” wrote researchers. “These effects were maintained within twin pairs discordant for residence. Moreover, vulnerabilities to cannabis use were not exacerbated by the legal cannabis environment. Future research may investigate causal links between cannabis consumption and outcomes,” the researchers added.

Another study released last year found that marijuana legalization has led to a reduction in filled prescriptions through that state’s Medicaid program.

“These results have important implications,” said Shayam Raman, one of the researchers involved in the study. “The reductions in drug utilization that we find could lead to significant cost savings for state Medicaid programs. The results also indicate an opportunity to reduce the harm that can come with the dangerous side effects associated with some prescription drugs.”

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A new study with a modest sampling pool found that cannabis retail companies are not adhering to state restrictions on social media, and are targeting teens.

The study was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs recently and online on January 19, and found that many recreational cannabis companies market their products in a way that appeals to children and teens, “flouting state regulations.” A press release was released the following day.

The study, “A Content Analysis of Cannabis Company Adherence to Marketing Requirements in Four States,” provided an analysis of social media posts from cannabis companies in a handful of legal states. 

A team of researchers evaluated one year of publicly displayed posts on Facebook and Instagram by retail cannabis companies in four states—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—and evaluated if companies adhered to restrictions on social media. 

Researchers looked for content that goes against restrictions, including branded promotions or discounts, modeling overconsumption, youth-focused messaging and health benefits. They also took a look at various state requirements.

They checked to see if companies displayed required warnings, including stating that cannabis is limited to people ages 21 and older, avoiding impaired driving and listing health risks.

But in the study, only 14 businesses were evaluated. Researchers evaluated 2,660 posts from those 14 businesses, to be exact. 

“I had expected that cannabis companies were unlikely to fully adhere to existing guidelines,” said lead author Megan Moreno, M.D., M.S.Ed., M.P.H., division chief of general pediatrics and adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Some cannabis companies generated dozens of social media posts per day, and there is no current system in place to monitor or enforce these regulations. However, it was surprising to see how the presence of guidelines made a difference between states.”

What the Findings Show

Discounts or promotions were found in approximately 35 percent of the posts, researchers said. “Overconsumption” was found in 12 percent percent of all posts. Content containing warnings, “despite being required,” researchers said, were evident in less than half of all posts.

The researchers noted that Washington State, for example, prohibits displaying branded products, such as T-shirts with a company logo. But they found that about one percent of the posts on social media from Washington state cannabis companies ignored this restriction.

The research team did admit that “in states without this regulation, these types of posts appeared between five and 10 times more frequently. So while regulation did not guarantee compliance, it seemed to have an impact on how often companies shared content that may or may not be restricted.”

“As a pediatrician, I know that marketing and advertisements have a strong influence on kids and teens,” said Moreno. “Previous studies have shown how alcohol and tobacco companies’ marketing is associated with youth using these products.”

She continued, “Parents should talk with their kids about how cannabis companies seek to influence them by using youth-friendly approaches, like using cartoon characters and memes.”

The study was picked up by FOX23 News and ABC10 in New York at the time of writing.

Both Facebook and Instagram fall under the Meta umbrella, and we can’t help but wonder if studies such as this impact Meta policy. “I don’t think the results of this study have any impact on Meta censoring cannabis brands because they justify their actions by saying cannabis is federally illegal in the U.S. and therefore not allowed anywhere in the world, even in countries where it’s federally legal, like Canada,” ADCANN CEO Cody Hicks told High Times. ADCANN provides cannabis marketing tools, such as how to restore an Instagram account if it’s been disabled because of cannabis.

We Have Questions

If legal cannabis companies are targeting teens, it doesn’t appear to be working. A separate, broad study published in the JAMA Pediatrics—using data from national and state Youth Risk Behavior Surveys from 1993 to 2017, researchers from Montana State University, University of Oregon, University of Colorado–Denver and San Diego State University—examined states that had legalized medical and adult use cannabis and the likelihood of teen use (during the past 30 days).

The study analyzed data from 27 states and the District of Columbia, and seven states where adult use of cannabis is legal, during a 25-year time period. Adult-use cannabis laws were associated with a eight percent decrease in the likelihood of teens trying cannabis, as well as a nine percent reduction in the odds of frequent cannabis use, the study found. They found medical cannabis laws had no significant effect on teen cannabis use.

Usually, headlines about children and cannabis tend to pop up around Halloween, yearly. Bias focused on the harm (or benefits) of cannabis abounds in both clinical and nonclinical cannabis-related research.

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