Warning after melatonin sales suspended

An RACGP child health expert has said it is ‘only due to luck’ there have been no deaths among Australian children from melatonin overdoses, after an online retailer suspended sales.
 
The American supplement website, iHerb, has suspended sales of all melatonin products, including gummies to Australia following a rise in reported overdoses.
 
As of August 2025, 322 calls had been made to the Western Australian Poisons Information Centre relating to melatonin overdoses, mainly for children who had taken too many gummies, compared to 175 in 2018, WA Today reports.
 
The NSW Poisons Information Centre has also reportedly recorded a surge in calls on the same issue.
 
RACGP Specific Interests Child and Young Person’s Health Chair, Dr Tim Jones, believes the increase is children ‘overdosing on gummies, thinking that they’re just lollies, and they can have more of them because they taste good’.
 
‘Melatonin is a hormone,’ he told newsGP.
 
‘It’s not something that you should be treating like a nutritional supplement, it’s more complex than that.’
 
He said he has seen an increase in parents reporting using the supplements for their children without any medical oversight.
 
‘What I’ve certainly seen in the last five years of my practice is that I’ve gone from the majority of families who are experiencing a sleep challenge in their child just coming to me as the first step to have a chat about what they could be doing, to the majority of families now coming to see me having already sourced some melatonin online and then coming in seeking support from that point on,’ he said.
 
He has urged for a return to sleep issues being considered ‘normal’ by parents and GPs, and for strategies to be considered before medication.
 
‘As GPs, we’ve got lots of good evidence-based resources to support that, so we need to be leaning into that with our families, to break down any shame or stigma, but offer those really practical supports as well.
 
‘If we’re just talking about what works and what’s common, a lot of these kids don’t need melatonin, so it’s a chance to get back to supporting families without necessarily any overprescribing.
 
‘What we know is that if we’ve got those in place, kids don’t just start sleeping well for a bit. This sets them up for good sleep for life, whereas if we’re medicating for sleep, and that’s our only strategy, we do have concerns that kids aren’t going to get great long-term outcomes out of that.’
 
Dr Jones is also concerned by what he sees as a trend to ‘casualise medication’ into gummies and lollies.
 
‘We don’t just see it with gummies,’ he said.
 
‘We see it with medicinal marijuana being available in all sorts of kind of very appealing lolly-like forms.
 
‘It’s almost trivialising the seriousness of what you’re doing. These are all medications, and they need to be treated as medications.’
 
A 2022 study in the US into the deaths of seven children aged two months to three years reported the presence of exogenous melatonin concentrations in the victims’ blood postmortem ranging from 3 to 1400 ng/mL.
 
‘We haven’t had [deaths] happen here yet, but I think that’s only due to luck,’ said Dr Jones.
 
He said the quality of online supplements was also a ‘real concern’ with wild variations between concentrations of medications in tested samples, and points to analyses of random samples that found between 1–1000% of the advertised content of melatonin.
 
‘I have a dubious level of trust for them,’ he said.
 
‘I see kids all the time where parents come in, having said they’ve sourced these things, but they notice one night their child seems excessively drowsy, another night, it doesn’t seem to do anything.
 
‘And I entirely chalk that up to it not being a product that’s containing a consistent amount of melatonin.’
 
Dr Jones acknowledges cost is an issue for many families, with prescription melatonin far more expensive than what people can buy online.
 
‘I’m aware that in a cost-of-living crisis that really matters. But what it takes me back to is that the majority of kids don’t need a supplement,’ he said.
 
‘I have real sympathy for families who are doing it tough, who have an autistic child who is really needing melatonin as part of their support. Because I do think this is going to be a challenging time for them to navigate.’
 
He notes around 30% of neurotypical pre-school aged Australian children will have some significant concern with their sleep at some stage, but that ‘has been true throughout human history’, and GPs are well placed to make a real difference.
 
‘Kids don’t always find sleep easy, and as parents I think we’ve lost confidence in what we can be doing that’s not medication-related to support healthy, long-term childhood sleep,’ he said.
 
Log in below to join the conversation.

children’s health gummies melatonin overdose sleep hygiene sleep problems