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

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.*

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Prevent Youth Access, State Report Shows appeared first on Marijuana Moment.