The most obvious answer is its recent surge in popularity. From 2009 to 2018, American melatonin use increased fivefold, and from 2016 to 2020, U.S. sales of the supplement rose from $285 million to $821 million. A pandemic-era surge in diagnosed sleep disorders may have only accelerated this growing popularity. …

Several other factors would also seem to be involved, Cohen told me. For starters, many melatonin supplements come in an appetizing gummy form. So do all sorts of vitamins and minerals for kids—vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, zinc—but melatonin is not a vitamin or a mineral. It’s an active hormone, and the body has not developed great mechanisms for coping with its intake in excess, Cohen said.

Nearly all of the patients Toce saw had eaten gummies, and most of those identified in the CDC’s emergency-room study were 3 to 5 years old. Maribeth Lovegrove, the researcher who led the CDC research, told me that for most medications, pediatric overdoses are concentrated among children under 2 years old. This discrepancy is telling, she said. Babies don’t know what they’re eating and often put random stuff in their mouth; slightly older kids, such as the ones who have been taking too much melatonin, may be more likely to mistake gummies for candy.

[I was not aware of the body’s inability to cope with excessive melatonin doses, so that is good to know. However, why are parents feeding melatonin to kids at all, especially if it functions as a hormone rather than a vitamin? If it’s pandemic-related, it’s yet another set of evidence for the damage that disrupting children’s lives did in shutdowns. But it seems odd that parents would medicate for sleep orders at those young ages without trying behavior modification first — more outdoors activities, less screen time, etc. And the melatonin gummies look like a very bad idea, given the way melatonin works in the body. — Ed]