Colorado clarified its marijuana packaging requirements Monday, extending to medical pot the same restrictions in place for recreational pot.
Gov. John Hickenlooper, who signed the bill into law, called it an important clarification to make sure minors don’t illegally access marijuana.
“Marijuana should not be easily accessible or attractive to kids,” Hickenlooper said.
The new law requires edible marijuana sold to medical marijuana patients to meet the same packaging standards as pot sold to recreational customers. The packaging must be opaque and childproof.
Most medical marijuana sold commercially already complies with existing recreational packaging standards.
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The new law also gives marijuana shops the same authority that liquor stores have to confiscate fraudulent IDs from underage consumers. It passed unanimously in both chambers of the legislature.
“Everyone came together on this,” said Rep. Daniel Kagan, a Denver Democrat who sponsored the law.
Dr. George Sam Wang, a pediatric emergency room physician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, joined the bill signing and said there’s anecdotal evidence of emergency rooms seeing more cases of youth marijuana overdoses.
But Wang said there’s not enough data to draw conclusions on the effect of recreational pot, and that more study is needed.
“We’ve only been experiencing this for a couple of years,” Wang said.
Another new law signed Monday allows local governments that want to run criminal background checks on people working in the marijuana industry to submit fingerprints to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Everyone working in the industry already completes state-level background checks.
