Scromiting is when you smoke so much weed that you start violently vomiting, sometimes retching so intensely that it sounds like you’re screaming while puking. It’s far from an epidemic, but cases have risen in the past year, which can partly be explained by the rollout of a dedicated medical billing code for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS.
CHS is worth taking seriously, especially as a new case report in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, first noticed by Gizmodo, demonstrates.
Doctors in Georgia described a patient, a 15-year-old boy, who was vomiting so violently for so long that it eventually caused a severe vitamin B1 deficiency. He lost around 25 to 30 pounds. He was confused; his speech was slurred, and he had problems walking, and his movements were uncontrollable. He could barely function.
Doctors diagnosed him with Wernicke encephalopathy, a potentially life-threatening neurological disorder caused by thiamine deficiency.
Cannabis-Induced Vomiting Got So Bad This Teen’s Body Ran Out of a Critical Vitamin
He was, essentially, vomiting so much that he was starving himself, as his body couldn’t keep in any of the nutrients that keep us all alive. Though his brain scans looked normal, doctors treated him with thiamine anyway. His neurological symptoms soon started to improve.
It was all because of CHS. He was eventually able to make a full recovery after he stopped using cannabis. “To our knowledge, this represents one of the earliest reported pediatric cases of Wernicke encephalopathy associated with CHS,” the authors of the case report wrote.
CHS doesn’t crop up after a few bong rips. It’s after long-term cannabis use, especially with today’s high-THC products that seem especially engineered to drive you mad and destroy your body after frequent use. This particular case was troubling and worth publication since Wernicke encephalopathy is usually associated with alcoholism.
CHS isn’t lurking around the corner of every joint and edible, but if you are regularly saturating your body with extremely potent THC, it’s probably best to cut back before the sounds of your vomiting can wake your neighbors and, apparently, also drain your body of all its nutrients.
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