Tiffany Mapel took the call on her way back from Dolores.

She heard the voice of her husband, Frank, before the call quickly was lost. Something about Cinder going to the vet.

When Mapel arrived at Riverview Animal Hospital, she could barely recognize her 8-year-old black Labrador retriever who still acts like a puppy.

Cinder was having seizures. Her face muscles were contorted, she was peeing everywhere, and she would flinch at the slightest touch.

“All four legs were out trying to hold herself up. She was pacing, panting. Her eyes were dilated,” Mapel said.

Doctors sent the family home and kept Cinder.

Back at the house, they looked around and quickly found a possible culprit: a gathering of teenage boys next door. It was April 20, the unofficial national holiday of marijuana.

The boys fessed up and said they had been cooking with pot. They put a piece in the compost pile, which Cinder ate.

It’s a growing problem, and it’s not limited to dogs or Durango.

With the liberalization of marijuana laws, children and pets are winding up in the emergency room after innocently eating pot.

Colorado veterinarians say they have noticed a sharp increase in marijuana exposure cases in the last year. And a team at Children’s Hospital Colorado found that emergency room visits for pot exposure in young children spiked after 2009, when medical marijuana became widely available. It was the first study of its kind in the country.

Sleepless night

Mapel, a teacher, adopted Cinder as a puppy from one of her 4-H students. She was one of 11 puppies in the litter.

“Cinder chose us. She came and sat in my husband’s lap. We knew she was the one,” Mapel said.

A year later, Mapel’s daughter Teagan was born. The overgrown puppy has been the girl’s best buddy her whole life.

Back at the hospital, the veterinarian discovered the pot poisoning about the same time the Mapels did. Doctors gave Cinder a charcoal treatment and IV because she was severely dehydrated.

They sent her home, but that night, Cinder walked into a wall and fell down.

“She didn’t sleep very much that night, and neither did we. The next morning she was a lot worse,” Mapel said.

They brought her back to the vet.

It’s different for dogs

Cinder isn’t the first dog to discover that a feel-good drug for humans works much differently in dogs.

“People have this misconception that drugs have the same effect on animals as they do on themselves,” said Dr. Apryl Steele, past president of the Denver Area Veterinary Medical Society.

The Mapels would recognize the classic symptoms of marijuana toxicity in dogs that Steele described – glassy eyes, lack of balance and hypersensitivity to touch. Some dogs are unconscious when they come in.

In the last six months to a year, vets have seen a large uptick in marijuana toxicity in dogs, said Steele, who practices at the Tender Touch Animal Hospital in Denver.

Most dogs recover completely, Steele said.

“They do get better, but having them come in comatose is a pretty scary thing,” she said.

Marijuana advocates often say their favorite drug is safer than alcohol. At least in one way, they are right.

Dogs who eat marijuana might suffer for a few days, but they rarely die. That’s not so for dogs who eat hops.

With the growing popularity of home brewing, veterinarians are seeing more cases of hops poisoning from dogs who eat the plants out of brewers’ compost piles. Hops poisoning can kill dogs.

Kids affected, too

For some of the same reasons dogs can be harmed by accidentally eating pot, so can little kids. They’re unsuspecting, and their lower body weight can’t process the high-potency pot for sale today in Colorado, said Dr. George Sam Wang of Children’s Hospital Colorado.

Wang co-wrote a study in The Journal of American Pediatrics last month that found 14 children had come to his hospital’s emergency department with pot ingestions since 2009, when medical marijuana took off. In the four years before 2009, there were no cases.

Kids on pot can lose their balance and fall, and in severe cases, they have trouble breathing, Wang said.

“We need to educate the public that you need to treat this as a medicine and a drug,” Wang said.

As Colorado finds its way through the new world of legal marijuana, Mapel, too, hopes users stop to consider the innocent kids and pets around them.

Recovery

The Mapels’ story has a happy ending that unfolded during four days.

Cinder came home from the vet a second time and slowly began to shake off the effects of the marijuana.

Mapel likes her neighbors, and they’re still friends. The neighbors were out of town when their son threw the party that included the pot Cinder ate.

“None of us was aware of the effects on pets. We don’t use marijuana. It’s not part of our lifestyle,” Mapel said.

Cinder is back to her exuberant self. And the Mapels have learned a lesson about Colorado’s experiment with marijuana that they hope other Coloradans can learn too – just not firsthand.

jhanel@durangoherald.com