No, 2.8 million Americans are not "screaming and vomiting"

The junk marijuana stat that fooled The New York Times

Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome — or “scromiting” — is a rare, debilitating condition causing incessant nausea that is only alleviated by hot showers.

The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many other news outlets want you to believe that 2.8 million people are regularly screaming and throwing up because they smoke too much weed. But, unfortunately, each of these outlets has been fooled by the same faulty study.

Last Friday, the Post ran an article about cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), a rarely diagnosed condition that causes heavy weed smokers severe nausea. The disease regularly presents with patients throwing up multiple times a day and feeling relief only when taking hot showers.

CHS is sometimes called “scromiting” (screaming and vomiting), mostly in a sensationalist effort to give the problem a more memorable and alarming name, but partially because “CHS” does a bad job encapsulating how debilitating this condition can be.

The Post uncritically reported that “about 2.75 million Americans experience CHS each year.” It also speculated that this figure may be an underestimate since “CHS can be hard to recognize.”

Certainly sounds alarming. That would mean almost 1% of Americans are smoking so much weed that they have become unable to lead regular lives.

I’m open to believing that marijuana legalization has come with some unintended consequences. I’m even willing to believe the drug is causing severe nausea in some heavy weed smokers. What I’m not open to believing is that nearly 3 million American stoners are effectively unable to work because they can’t stop vomiting.

In February, The New York Times’ editorial board published a piece reconsidering the paper’s past support for marijuana legalization and advocating for new federal regulations and taxes. It led its section on the dangers of heavy weed use by noting that “Each year, nearly 2.8 million people in the United States suffer from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which causes severe vomiting and stomach pain.”

Multiple other outlets have also cited the same figure.

The problem? This figure is built upon a single 2018 paper with a poorly sampled study group and an outrageously broad definition of CHS.