Colorado’s private-sector pot stores strict about IDing minors, study shows

Private-sector marijuana stores in Colorado are strict and consistent about checking their customers’ ages, a study shows.

For the study, undercover researchers visited 20 legal marijuana outlets in the state in August of 2015 to try to buy marijuana. The buyers were over 21 – the minimum age to buy pot in Colorado – but were chosen because they appeared younger.

All 20 stores tried to check the buyer’s ID. For the purposes of the study, the buyer was told to not produce ID if asked for it.

At eight stores, the researcher wasn’t even allowed inside without showing ID. One store was willing to sell marijuana to the buyer after they refused to show proof of age.

“Compliance with laws restricting marijuana sales to individuals age 21 years or older … was extremely high and possibly higher than compliance with restrictions on alcohol sales,” the study’s authors wrote.

The study was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Provinces are scrambling to figure out the details of legal marijuana sales before July, 2018. (At least one premier has said that deadline is too tight.)

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The two most obvious options for retail marijuana sales are public-sector liquor store systems (though not necessarily in the same physical stores that sell alcohol) and regulated private stores.

Unions across the country have backed the first option, and several provincial governments have said they agree.

Liberal MP Bill Blair said in January that publicly run liquor stores would be better at enforcing age limits for pot.

“You’re going to come up against a government employee who’s got regulations to enforce and is going to ask for identification and if a person’s under age, they’re not going to be able to buy that,” he told the Toronto Star.

The Colorado data, on the other hand, implies that strictly regulated private-sector stores can be trusted not to sell pot to underage customers.

It’s a felony in Colorado to sell marijuana to someone under 21, while people selling cigarettes to minors in Ontario face a small fine at most.

Under the Liberals’ proposed Cannabis Act, people selling cannabis to teens 17 or under could face up to 14 years in prison.

The near-perfect compliance rate in Colorado is far higher than shown in Canadian studies of underage access to cigarettes and alcohol.

In a 2010 Ontario study, minors were able to buy cigarettes from convenience stores 13 per cent of the time, beer from the Beer Store 20 per cent of the time, and alcohol from provincially owned liquor stores a quarter of the time.

A 2013 study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health showed that 19 per cent of underage smokers bought cigarettes directly from stores.

In 2014, 17-year-olds accompanied by an adult tried to buy cigarettes in 190 Ontario convenience stores. They succeeded in about one in five attempts. In Toronto, that number rose to 56 per cent, and it was 30 per cent in Barrie, Windsor and North Bay.

The authors of the Colorado study cautioned that they chose slow times of day for their study. They said that that if they had come at busier times when the staff was distracted, if they had used good-quality fake ID, or if the buyers had been more experienced with marijuana, the refusal rate might not have been as high.