Marijuana Moment: 99% Of Colorado Marijuana Retailers Properly Checked IDs To Prevent Youth Access, State Report Shows

[Tokeativity]

Colorado regulators are touting another successful year of nearly perfect marijuana business compliance with state laws prohibiting the sale of cannabis to underage youth—with 99 percent of retailers checking IDs to verify the age of covert investigators.

The state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED) said in a newsletter sent on Thursday that investigators conducted 469 underage compliance checks in 2025 “as part of its focus on preventing youth access to marijuana.”

“The compliance rate on those checks was 99 percent,” it said. “The MED also conducted investigations into an additional 309 licenses last year related to preventing youth access.”

A recent report on regulatory and enforcement activity from MED detailed the division’s broader investigatory efforts last year, including inspections of more than 2,800 cannabis business licenses (about 235 per month). Of those licensee checks, 846 resulted in administrative action by the state’s licensing authority and about $1.1 million in fine assessments.

“The MED also continued to refine processes to address product and consumer safety concerns, issuing 17 Health & Safety Advisories in 2025 that alerted consumers to potential contamination risks in regulated marijuana products,” it added. “Health & Safety Advisories are issued for regulated marijuana that was sold to the public and subsequently found to have contaminants that exceeded acceptable limits established in Colorado law. Those contaminants included mold, aspergillus, pesticides, and elemental impurities such as arsenic.”

With respect to the underage compliance checks, Colorado businesses have consistently proven to take the law seriously by requiring ID verification before a person can enter the store to view and purchase marijuana products, while turning away those with invalid documentation or whose IDs show they’re under 21.

Colorado isn’t necessarily unique in its high scores for compliance, as other reports and studies on legal jurisdictions such as New York City have similarly found that the vast majority of retailers are doing their part by refusing service to underage youth.

The statistics reinforce what advocates have long argued: Regulations are more effective than blanket prohibition in promoting public health and safety, including preventing youth access. And when adults are able to transit to licensed retailers to buy cannabis, that can undermine the illicit market where IDs aren’t being rigorously inspected for age verification purposes.

That retail-level compliance is just one factor advocates and experts attribute to the fact that data shows youth cannabis use has either declined or remained stable in states that have enacted legalization.

For example, last December, the nationally representative Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey—which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)—found that teen marijuana use “remained stable” this year even as more states have enacted legalization.

A separate federally funded study out of Canada that was released last November found that that youth marijuana use rates actually declined after the country legalized cannabis.

The study was released about three months after German officials released a separate report on their country’s experience with legalizing marijuana nationwide.

Last July, federal health data also indicated that while past-year marijuana use in the U.S. overall has climbed in recent years, the rise has been “driven by increases…among adults 26 years or older.” As for younger Americans, rates of both past-year use and cannabis use disorder, by contrast, “remained stable among adolescents and young adults between 2021 and 2024.”

A report from the advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), for example, found that youth marijuana use declined in 19 out of 21 states that legalized adult-use marijuana—with teen cannabis consumption down an average of 35 percent in the earliest states to legalize. The report cited data from a series of national and state-level youth surveys, including the annual MTF survey.

Another survey from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2024 also showed a decline in the proportion of high-school students reporting past-month marijuana use over the past decade, as dozens of states moved to legalize cannabis.

At the state level, MPP’s assessment looked at research such as the Washington State Healthy Youth Survey that was released in April 2024.

That survey showed declines in both lifetime and past-30-day marijuana use in recent years, with striking drops that held steady through 2023. The results also indicated that perceived ease of access to cannabis among underage students has generally fallen since the state enacted legalization for adults in 2012—contrary to fears repeatedly expressed by opponents of the policy change.

In 2024, meanwhile, the biannual Healthy Kids Colorado Survey found that rates of youth marijuana use in the state declined slightly in 2023—remaining significantly lower than before the state became one of the first in the U.S. to legalize cannabis for adults in 2012.

Photo courtesy of Mike Latimer.

The post 99% Of Colorado Marijuana Retailers Properly Checked IDs To Prevent Youth Access, State Report Shows appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

View the live link on MarijuanaMoment.net