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Four Boca Ciega High students hospitalized after eating drug-laced 'gummy' candies

 
Published April 12, 2016

GULFPORT — Four Boca Ciega High students were hospitalized Monday after eating drug-laced gummy candies, officials said.

Gulfport police Chief Robert Vincent said presumptive tests showed that the drug was likely THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

Pinellas County Schools spokeswoman Lisa Wolf said a student brought the candies to school and passed them around to other students. Seven students ate the candies, she said, and four were taken to Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital as a precaution.

Wolf said the parents of the students taken to the hospital were notified.

"The school is reviewing the incident to understand what happened" and is working with Gulfport police, she said. Wolf declined to comment on the students' medical conditions, whether any students would be disciplined, or how the school found out about the drugs.

Vincent said the investigation was ongoing and no charges had been filed as of Monday afternoon. He declined to speak in detail about the case.

Boca Ciega High, at 924 58th St S in Gulfport, has an enrollment of 1,720 students.

Dr. Patrick Mularoni, a pediatric emergency physician at Johns Hopkins All Children's, said hospitalizations for children who eat marijuana edibles made to look like candies are on the rise across the country, especially as more states move to legalize recreational marijuana.

"This is, unfortunately, one of the uncommon and unwanted side effects for the legalization of marijuana," he said. "It's something that's happening that we're not used to in the pediatric center."

Mularoni, who said he did not treat any of the students from Boca Ciega, said users cannot be physically harmed or fatally overdose on marijuana, but too much could make a high school student sleepy and unarousable as well as paranoid and anxious.

Unlike smoking marijuana, he said it's difficult to gauge how much THC a user consumes with an edible because, unlike alcohol, there is no test to determine how much marijuana was consumed. He added that it often takes more than one hour for the effects of marijuana to set in and sometimes users have a larger dose because they do not feel the effects immediately.

Mularoni said the edibles consumed by the students most likely were not laced with another drug and likely were imported from states such as Colorado or Washington with recreational dispensaries that sell edibles.

"There's no antidote for marijuana ingestion," he said. "An ER doctor would need to calm the patient's nerves and observe them until the marijuana wore off."

Contact Colleen Wright at cwright@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8643. Follow @Colleen_Wright on Twitter.