As the world heads toward higher acceptance of cannabis, detractors will stoop to any level necessary to maintain the misinformation about the herb. In 2004, when Britain was debating the reclassification of marijuana from a Class B drug to a Class C drug, the "first ever" death from cannabis toxicity coincidentally happened in Wales. While the classification of cannabis was changed to Class C, it did get reclassified as a Class B again later as the prohibitionists regained some control.
Fast forward to ten years later and attitudes toward marijuana are again dangerously accepting. That must mean it's time for another "first ever" death from one of the least toxic therapeutically active substances known to man. In October of 2013 a 31 year old woman in Bournemouth, England died of cardiac arrest. No causes for her heart attack could be found during the autopsy process so they took the easy way out, the coroner just blamed it on the cannabis in her system. How much did it take to kill her? One half of a joint.
This is clearly either lazy incompetence on the part of the coroner, or it is deceitful activism from a prohibitionist unhappy with the progress being made bringing the truth about the Drug War to light. The coroner claims that the post-mortem found no natural cause of death "with balance of probability that it is more likely than not that she died from the effects of cannabis."
Seeing as though Britain's National Health Service released a study as recent as 2011 claiming not only that there are Zero cases of death caused by cannabis toxicity confirmed, there have also been no known cases of fatal overdose even reported, ever, which implies they have rejected the 2004 claim. So, that leads one to question what this coroner means by "balance of probability" for Occam's Razor was certainly not used in this probability model.
Whether this toxicity claim is being made out of incompetence or maliciousness, we may never know. However, we can be fairly certain that if it was possible for half of a joint to kill someone then it probably would have happened a few times before in the last 100,000 years.