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“Scromitting” Panic

houseJohn Grady Dec 5, 2025

Another Chapter in America’s Tradition of Prohibitionist Skybalon

By John Grady

If you’ve been watching the news lately you’ve seen it: headlines blaring about a surge in Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS)…vomiting, Emergency Room (ER) trips, a “cannabis health crisis.” But once you dig into the numbers you realize the media is selling reruns, not reporting real epidemics.

National data from roughly 806 million Emergency Department (ED) visits between 2016 and 2022 show that CHS-coded visits rose from 4.4 per 100,000 to a peak of 33.1 per 100,000…then settled around 22.3 per 100,000 by 2022. That’s a big relative increase…but in absolute terms it remains a blip. CHS visits remain a tiny fraction of total ER traffic.

Another recent study looking at younger patients (2016–2023) found just 4,571 CHS-related ER encounters nationwide. That works out to roughly 1,968 encounters per 1,000,000 ED visits in 2023. Less than two-tenths of one percent (<.2%). At the same time legalization and cannabis use expanded…and clinicians gained awareness…coding practices changed. That likely produced much of the increase. In plain English: doctors started recognizing what was once dismissed as “just bad vomiting.” Now it gets labeled CHS.

Make no mistake: CHS is real and it's painful. For long-term, heavy cannabis users, bouts of nausea and vomiting can be brutal…sometimes sending people multiple times to the hospital. But that reality doesn’t justify turning those rare cases into a national panic. The headlines treat CHS like a tsunami. The data show a ripple.

This is how the Skybalon narrative gets built: take tiny numbers, inflate them with fear, ignore context, and wrap it all in stark warnings…then scream “public health crisis.” Insert the next crisis here…That says more about the fear-mongers than the facts. Cannabis has risks. So does everything. But real public-health priorities don’t get judged by clicks and clickbait. They get judged by real numbers, honest context, and sober analysis.

If we’re going to debate the pros and cons of cannabis, fine. Do it with integrity. Don’t build mountains out of statistical molehills and then scream about the collapse.