‘Scromiting,’ a bizarre condition linked to chronic marijuana use, is on the rise

A mother on TikTok described her uncontrollable bouts of vomiting after marijuana use, saying it was a pain worse than childbirth.

“I was crying and screaming and saying, ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ I was like. “I hate my life,” he said. “I’m just begging God, please stop this!”

The medical name for this condition, dubbed “scromiting” on social media for its combination of screaming and loud vomiting, is hemp hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS, which is on the rise in the United States. Regular marijuana users, including teenagers, come to emergency rooms complaining of severe intestinal distress.

D., a pediatric emergency medicine specialist and toxicologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado who treats adolescents with this condition. “They are writhing, holding their stomach, complaining of very severe abdominal pain and nausea,” Sam Wang said.

“They vomit and continue vomiting whatever is in their stomach, which can last for hours,” Wang said. he told CNN in an earlier interview. “They say they often took a scorching hot shower before coming to the emergency room, but it didn’t help.”

Emergency treatment consists of anti-nausea medications and IV fluids to combat dehydration from vomiting. However, patients are also test battery to rule out other causes: blood and urine tests, expensive CT scans, unpleasant upper GI endoscopy, and gastric emptying tests, to name a few.

For some adolescents, these tests may be repeated many times.

“For some of our kids, this is their fifth emergency room visit in the last two months with symptoms they can’t control,” Wang said.

And if they wait too long to get in, the situation can be life-threatening.

“Regardless of whether it’s marijuana hyperemesis syndrome or another virus that’s making you vomit so much,” Wang said, “if you let it go on for too long, you can experience electrolyte disturbances, go into shock, and organ failure. CHS is no different.”

It’s a strange situation

Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome a band on the medical scene in 2004 Australian researchers wrote about 19 chronic marijuana users who experienced recurrent attacks of abdominal pain and retching. Researchers followed nine of the patients over time and found that symptoms disappeared when marijuana use was stopped, but symptoms returned when it was restarted.

Oddly, more than half of the 19 people reported using extremely hot baths or showers to self-treat their symptoms. As more and more cases of CHS began to emerge, hot baths as a home treatment became a recurring theme.

“It’s pretty universal for these patients to say they need a really hot shower or a really hot bath to improve their symptoms,” he said.

Why is it hot? “It’s not entirely clear,” said Wang, who is also an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado.

Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive compound in weed, has access to the body’s pain receptors; so one theory is that the distracting sensation of extreme heat interrupts the pain cycle, thus relieving symptoms.

To further compound the strangeness of the disorder, THC and other cannabinoids in the marijuana plant have been used to relieve pain; paradoxically, it alleviated nausea and vomiting in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. But despite the popularity of marijuana as a pain reliever, Study results regarding its effectiveness are mixed.

Yet why does the same compound both provide relief and cause pain? Among the countless possibilities: dosage levels. Wang points to the increasing potency of THC in today’s cannabis products.

“It has now been documented that the amount of THC found in marijuana has increased significantly,” Wang said. “In the ’90s, the average was around 4% or 5%. Now in Colorado, it’s between 15% and 20%.”

Another mystery: Not all heavy weed users are affected by CHS.

“It’s not entirely clear who is prone to this,” Wang said. “Is it a certain frequency or duration of use? A certain potency? Or a certain type of product? We don’t have this data.”

CHS is on the rise

Data show that CHS is a national problem. Between 2005 and 2014, when only medical marijuana was legal in most states. 2020 study Approximately 1 in 5 people hospitalized for cyclic vomiting in the United States report concurrent marijuana use.

After Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, Wang and colleagues found more than 800,000 reported cases of marijuana-induced vomiting in Colorado between 2013 and 2018. There has been an increase of about 29% since legalization, Wang said. The study was published on: September 2021found that the rate was highest in counties where there were previously no marijuana dispensaries.

A more recent study Released in July 2025, found that emergency room visits by adolescents ages 13 to 21 nationwide increased more than 10-fold between 2016 and 2023. November 2025 The study found that the rate of CHS among adults ages 18 to 35 increased sharply and remained high during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.

However, all of these studies have been limited by the lack of a medical diagnosis or insurance billing code that would allow objective monitoring of CHS. To conduct the studies, researchers had to compare medical records of vomiting with documented or self-reported cases of marijuana use (data that many people refused to provide).

This has changed. A US federal committee is created on October 1, 2025 R11.16The official medical diagnosis code for cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. The World Health Organization has done the same, allowing researchers around the world to better monitor the situation. Experts say future studies will be more accurate and allow researchers to shed more light on this unusual condition.

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