Food Allergy and Drugs: Some Important Points To Consider
Can you be allergic to weed, and can you do a skin prick test for marijuana?
Are there food allergy risks associated with other drugs?
My brother and I were wide-eyed as we watched the 1980 flick Atlantic City at our grandparents' house one summer. It was a hot night and we had been out on the court all day, running around with our cousins, putting Sun In in our hair, taking a dip in the public pool down the street. After hungrily inhaling a dinner of stracciatella soup, we all settled in to watch a movie together. And lucky for us it was in English! And not a soap opera! Double score.
In the film, Susan Sarandon moves to Atlantic City to restart her life with Robert Joy, in the casino industry. There's some kerfuffle about drugs, I don't remember most of the plot, and then the pinnacle scene happened that actually made me sit up and take notice. The drug dealers cut their cocaine with other powders, like baby powder and milk powder, before it hit the streets.
Now don't get the wrong idea here; at 12 years old I was not interested in drugs, nor am I today. But it did open my mind to the fact that things other than food could be allergenic and unsafe for me. It grew a very sudden and deep sense of curiosity within me. I couldn't wait to get to my computer to Ask Jeeves more about my recent revelation.
As if by fate, when the school year started up again one of our assignments was that each student in our class had to pick a drug and prepare a presentation about it. I was assigned ecstacy. I was ecstatic. This was like a dream come true for me, because it allowed me to research my little heart out without raising suspicion among my parents.
In our family we had the "don't do drugs" talk where we learned that drugs are bad, cause addiction, and can kill you. And that was really enough to influence my choices. But we had never discussed the possibility that they could cause anaphylaxis. Now to me, that was extremely interesting. And if there's one thing that ever made me say no to peer pressure, it was the knowledge that something could cause a reaction more than anything else.
I mean, think about it. You can't exactly ask a dealer for an ingredients label and whether this pill or that was made in a safe facility. It could have been shoved in some guy's sweaty underwear for a week for all you know. And what about the communal nature of some drugs? In every high school there are kids who smoke weed. But I always had it in the back of my mind that if I wouldn't share a drink with someone for fear of cross contact, then why would I share a blunt? With weed now legal in Canada, it's something that teens should be educated about.
There was always something about the presence of weed smoke that made my stomach a little queasy but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. As a teen and young adult in Toronto, I was often in the presence of people smoking weed, even just on the streets. But my gut told me that it wasn’t the right fit for me, and I know my gut is full of wisdom.
Years later, I got tested for marijuana allergy at my allergist’s office. He told me it was a more common concern for teens than I might have thought, and in fact I did know someone else who developed an anaphylactic weed allergy, who was around my age. Sure enough, my skin prick test showed up positive and my allergist told me to avoid marijuana, a now legal herb. For all those years and through all that constant peer pressure, my gut was right and I was so smart to have trusted my instincts.
While this might seem like an odd topic, because drugs are.. well they’re DRUGS for god’s sake, it's something that I feel is important because they are part of our society and nearly everyone will face peer pressure at some point in their life. There’s no benefit in pretending these things don’t exist in real life. In university it seemed like suddenly drugs were more pervasive than I had ever imagined they would be, and beyond just weed. If I hadn't done my research years ago, maybe I would have succumbed without knowing the risks. Who knows?
But I do know one thing for sure. As you move into your teen years, the burden of managing your food allergies shifts towards yourself and away from your parents. And when you're an adult, it's all you baby. So it's important to do exhaustive research on everything you can imagine. There are no free passes when it comes to food allergies. So if a potential angle enters your mind, like drugs did for me when I was a tween, then research the shit out of it. There's no such thing as having "too much" knowledge.
