New York Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald, third from left, and healthcare representatives from the New York State Office of Cannabis Management participate in a forum on trends in cannabis-related emergency department visits and state initiatives supporting health care systems on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. Dr. Carrie Danziger, division chief and medical director of pediatric emergency medicine at Albany Medical Center, right, chaired the event. (Will Waldron/Times Union)
Will Waldron/Times Union
New York Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald participates in a forum on trends in cannabis-related emergency department visits and state initiatives supporting health care systems on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union)
Will Waldron/Times Union
J’Aimee A. Louis, Cannabis Program Manager, New York State Department of Health participates in a forum on trends in cannabis-related emergency department visits and state initiatives supporting health care systems on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union)
Will Waldron/Times Union
Erica Stupp, lead epidemiologist with the New York State Office of Cannabis Management participates in a forum on trends in cannabis-related emergency department visits and state initiatives supporting health care systems on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union)
Will Waldron/Times Union
Dr. Junella Chin, Chief Medical Officer at the Office of Cannabis Management participates in a forum on trends in cannabis-related emergency department visits and state initiatives supporting health care systems on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union)
Will Waldron/Times Union
New York Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald, left, and J’Aimee A. Louis, Cannabis Program Manager, New York State Department of Health, right, participate in a forum on trends in cannabis-related emergency department visits and state initiatives supporting health care systems on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union)
Will Waldron/Times Union
ALBANY — Cannabis has overtaken Tylenol as one of the most common ways young children in New York poison themselves, the state’s top health official said Wednesday as the first comprehensive accounting of how legalization has reshaped emergency rooms was released.
“If it fits in a child’s hand, it’s going to go in a child’s mouth,” said Dr. James V. McDonald, the state health commissioner and a pediatrician for 36 years.
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For his entire career, he said during a panel discussion at Albany Medical Center, the household poison he worried about most was acetaminophen or ibuprofen. “Well, now it’s cannabis.”
The new Department of Health report, drawing on records from every hospital and emergency department in the state, confirms a doubling in cannabis-related poisoning visits since 2016, rising from about 1,200 to nearly 2,400 statewide in 2024.
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The steepest climb came among children under 5, whose visit rate rose nearly 40-fold over that period. Among toddlers, cannabis poisonings now exceed emergency visits for Tylenol, aspirin and similar painkillers combined, and they were the leading poisoning diagnosis resulting in hospital admissions last year.
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The findings arrive five years after New York legalized cannabis, and they land as the state tries to shift from building a legal market to managing its public health consequences.
J’Aimee Louis, the state Health Department’s cannabis program manager, said the goal of the report is to “move from assumptions and from anecdote to evidence,” and then “from evidence and from data to action.”
New York’s medical cannabis program began sales in 2016, and lawmakers legalized recreational use in 2021. In the years between, a federal loophole allowed intoxicating hemp-derived products to spread through convenience stores and unlicensed shops proliferated faster than the regulated market could open. The report cannot say which products, legal or illicit, are sending people to the hospital. The state’s billing database does not capture product type, potency or source.
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That gap troubles clinicians, who say the official numbers understate the crisis. Dr. Molly Boyd, an Albany Medical Center toxicologist, told the panel she found only six pediatric marijuana ingestions in her hospital’s coded records, yet she has personally seen roughly that many in the past couple months.
“The numbers we’re seeing in that report are absolutely the floor, they are not the ceiling,” she said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Dr. Carrie Danziger, who leads Albany Med’s pediatric emergency department and moderated the discussion, said the presentations were unheard of when she trained.
“We were not taught about this in medical school; we were not taught about this in residency training,” she said, describing teenagers arriving with cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, a cycle of violent vomiting tied to heavy use of high-potency products.
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Hospitals, she added, are spending enormous sums working up children for strokes and sepsis before discovering cannabis was the cause.
The raw numbers remain small against the backdrop of all emergency care. Poisonings among children under 5 years of age amounted to a tiny fraction of that group’s total visits, and officials noted that visits coded as cannabis-related may sometimes be incidental to the reason a patient sought care.
McDonald acknowledged the share is small, but rejected the comfort in it: “It should be zero.”
Unlike nearly every other childhood poisoning category, which has declined for years, cannabis is the one heading upward.
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State officials note the regulated market is part of the solution, not the problem.
Dr. June Chin, chief medical officer at the Office of Cannabis Management, displayed seized illicit edibles mimicking Doritos and candy alongside licensed products in child-resistant, plainly labeled packaging, and said safe storage should become as routine as buckling a car seat. She pointed to the state’s new Center of Excellence for Cannabis Care and Health Equity, a first-in-the-nation training hub for clinicians.
“The goal is not to make every clinician a cannabis expert,” Chin said, “but it’s to make sure that no clinician is unprepared.”
Erica Stupp, the agency’s lead epidemiologist, said a public education campaign aimed at children ages 11 to 17 and the adults they trust is launching imminently.
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For McDonald, the report’s value lies in what happens next. Awareness alone, he told the room, changes nothing.
“What you do with the awareness does.” McDonald said.