Six Hundred Percent
A number designed to alarm you
There is a statistic circulating in the North Carolina General Assembly right now, and it has the clean, alarming quality of a number that was chosen to end a conversation rather than start one.
The rate of emergency department visits for cannabis ingestion among children 17 and under has increased 600 percent since 2019.
Six hundred percent. Legislators are citing it. The Governor cited it in his executive order creating the Cannabis Advisory Council. It has appeared in at least nine bills introduced this session. It is doing a lot of work.
We want to talk about what that number actually means — and what happens when you put it next to the numbers nobody is citing.
First, what the 600 percent actually represents
That figure describes a rate increase, not a raw count. Those are very different things. If 100 children visited an emergency room for cannabis ingestion in 2019 and 700 visited in 2024, that is a 600 percent rate increase. The percentage sounds catastrophic. The number is 700.
According to NC DETECT — the state's own disease tracking system — North Carolina recorded approximately 1,424 emergency department visits for cannabis consumption among people ages 0 to 24 in 2025. Working through those numbers, the under-17 portion lands somewhere around 700 to 900 visits for the entire year.
Now let's look at what else is happening to children in North Carolina.
The numbers the legislature isn't talking about
Opioids and fentanyl: In a single decade — 2015 to 2024 — 170 babies, children, and teenagers in North Carolina died after fentanyl exposure, according to the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Not emergency room visits. Deaths. Infants under six months old were among the most affected. As of 2024, North Carolina was losing roughly eight residents per day to drug overdose — a crisis that has claimed more than 44,500 North Carolinians since 2000.
Prescription drugs: More than 20 percent of North Carolina's 11th graders have taken prescription drugs without a doctor's prescription, according to the state Department of Justice. Non-opioid analgesics — meaning common painkillers like acetaminophen — are among the most frequent causes of childhood poisoning in emergency settings nationwide. Tylenol sends more children to the ER than cannabis.
Alcohol: Nationally, more than 57,000 alcohol-related emergency department visits occur among children ages 12 to 17 annually. Approximately 4,000 people under 21 die each year from alcohol-related causes. North Carolina sees more than 66,000 alcohol-related emergency department visits each year across all ages, and alcohol contributes to a quarter of all traffic fatalities in this state.
Firearms: In 2020, North Carolina recorded approximately 1,967 firearm-related emergency department visits among children and teens — more than double the cannabis ER visits for under-17s in 2025. In 2021, 121 North Carolina children died from firearm injuries. Firearms are now the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in North Carolina. Not a leading cause. The leading cause.
Cannabis deaths among children in North Carolina: zero documented cases.
We'll give you a moment with that.
What a cannabis "ER visit" often looks like
Not all of those 700 to 900 annual visits represent what most people picture when they hear the phrase "child overdose." Many involve toddlers who found a gummy that looked like candy and were brought in by frightened parents as a precaution. Some involve teenagers whose urine screen showed THC — which can reflect use from days earlier — while they were treated for something unrelated. "Cannabis found in the system" is not the same as "cannabis sent them to the emergency room."
None of this means we are unconcerned about children. We are not. Age restrictions make sense. Better packaging makes sense. Knowing what's in a product makes sense. But precision matters when you are making policy, and the precision is missing from this debate.
The argument nobody wants to make out loud
If you look at the data honestly, the "protect the children" argument applied specifically and urgently to cannabis — while opioids kill North Carolina children by the dozens, while alcohol sends 57,000 kids a year to ERs nationally, while firearms are the leading cause of child death in this state — is not a public health argument. It is a political one.
The question worth asking is: why cannabis?
The honest answer takes us back further than most legislators want to go.
Cannabis prohibition in this country did not begin with science. It began with Harry Anslinger, the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who built his career in the 1930s on a campaign that combined fabricated horror stories about marijuana-induced violence with explicit racial targeting. The campaign worked. The Reefer Madness era was not an organic public health response to documented harm. It was a manufactured moral panic, with a documented racial subtext, that became federal law and then, for decades, unchallengeable dogma.
That stigma — built on disinformation and racism, not medicine — is the foundation on which today's "600 percent" talking point rests. We are not saying that every legislator invoking that number is acting in bad faith. Many are genuinely concerned. But the tradition they are drawing from has never been honest about cannabis, and the selectivity of their concern — this plant, this urgency, this crisis, while fentanyl and alcohol and firearms do what they do — deserves to be named.
What we actually support
We opened PhenomWell in March 2019 with the belief that adults deserve accurate information and access to a plant that genuinely helps many people — with sleep, with pain, with anxiety, with quality of life. We have operated with voluntary age verification from day one. We support age restrictions. We support honest labeling. We support product testing standards. We support keeping intoxicating products out of gas stations and convenience stores where they don't belong.
What we don't support is prohibition dressed up as child protection. What we don't support is a regulatory framework designed not to regulate an industry but to eliminate it, while the substances that are actually killing children in this state continue to be sold freely on every corner.
The 600 percent is a real number. It just isn't the number it's being presented as. And it isn't the number that should be keeping anyone up at night.
PhenomWell Hemp Dispensary has served Salisbury and the surrounding community since March 2019. We are committed to education, transparency, and responsible access to hemp-derived products for adults.