Editor’s note: this story has been updated. A late amendment in the House passed last week removing the increased purchase limits.
Daily marijuana purchase limits would have doubled under a bill making its way through the Colorado legislature, with proponents claiming it will help a financially troubled industry.
The bill passed out of the state House over the objections of law enforcement, psychiatric groups, and concerned parents — all worried it will increase diversion to the black market.
A mother, Sharon Alvarez, recounted to lawmakers earlier this month how her 16-year-old son was addicted to high-potency marijuana and was in a diversion program for theft. In emotional testimony, she said she was tormented by where his life was heading.
“We have tried many programs to help him to no avail,” said Alvarez. “He has been suspended from school twice this year for being caught with THC vapes on school property. I used to wonder how he could get his hands on his drugs, these are dispensary products. My son has never stepped into a dispensary.”
The bill’s sponsors countered that school surveys show marijuana use has actually declined since legalization. The Healthy Kids Colorado Survey showed 12.8 percent of high schoolers reported using marijuana in the last month, down significantly from 2019, when 20.6 percent of high school students reported marijuana use.
Lawmakers ultimately were not ready to change the limits, and amended the bill to remove the increase.
House Bill 1209 is titled “Marijuana Regulation Streamline,” and it’s largely designed to reduce some of the extraordinary regulatory burden faced by marijuana growers and sellers. Bill sponsors admitted it was complex and technical, but would reduce unnecessary costs on a cash-strapped industry.
Among the changes: it would lessen the number of cameras required in cannabis businesses. Lawmakers were surprised at the number of cameras required when they toured grow houses, covering almost every square inch. The bill would also loosen some background check requirements for workers, and digitize part of the process.
Colorado pioneered the nation’s first laws and rules on recreational marijuana sales more than a decade ago.
“Now things are a lot different,” said one of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. William Lindstedt, D-Broomfield, at a committee hearing earlier this month. “We are gonna go from the first state to pass recreational sales to the first state to fail at recreational sales if we stay on this track. Our regulatory environment is inhospitable to this industry.”
Lindstedt said that the onerous burden is pushing marijuana jobs out of state, and reducing the tax collections that the state and local governments rely on for many programs, including school construction and mental health programs.
Chuck Smith, with Colorado Leads, a marijuana trade group, said at a committee hearing that “red tape” regulations made sense when Colorado was first in the nation. But “frankly we haven't seen a lot of the unintended consequences or concerns that people had when they put those regulations in. So now is the right time and frankly, it's more than the right time — this industry is in a severe economic downdraft.”
The marijuana industry is in its first and longest sales downturn since legalization. Total cannabis sales in Colorado last year were $1.4 billion, down 37 percent since 2021 when sales peaked at $2.2 billion. Businesses over-invested during the boom years of the pandemic, and sales and demand has fallen since, while competition from other states has increased.
Smith said that the industry has lost over 15,000 jobs over the last four years. He said that cutting back on regulations would help businesses and also free state authorities to focus on diversion to kids and other public safety measures.
The industry and the bill’s sponsors acknowledged that increasing the daily sales limit from one ounce to two ounces would help the businesses. Currently, people can possess up to two ounces, and proponents said that it made no sense to have a limit on purchases lower than the limit to possess.
“Right now people are going in they're buying one ounce, they're going back out to their car putting it in their car, going back inside and buying another ounce,” said Lindstedt on the House floor on Thursday. “This is not enforceable, it's not providing any legitimate public health purpose by having this limit on the books.”
Rep. Kyle Brown, D-Broomfield, wasn’t convinced. He unsuccessfully tried to amend the bill to remove the increase in daily sales limits. He said making it easier for people to buy more marijuana to divert it to the black market was a bad idea.
“That is already illegal, and so I think the argument that (Lindstedt) is making, it sounds like to me, is that since that is already happening we should just go ahead and raise the limits,” said Brown. “I'm not ready to say that something that I think is illegal, and obviously can be used for folks who want to put this into the hands of kids — we should just give up and allow them to do that.”
His amendment failed on a voice vote, but was resurrected later on a recorded vote.
The current purchase limit of one ounce may sound like a small amount, but equals roughly 56 medium-sized (0.5 gram) joints. That’s more than any one person could safely consume in a week, let alone a day. Still, the bill’s supporters said marijuana should not be treated differently from alcohol, which has no limits.
It’s unclear how much legal marijuana makes its way to the black market for kids in Colorado, or shipped out of state to places like Nebraska, Utah, and Kansas, which don’t have fully legal marijuana markets. In 2019, a Denver dispensary’s owners pleaded guilty to allowing customers to buy an ounce at a time multiple times a day, and those customers admitted, as part of the investigation, that they were taking the marijuana out of state to sell.
The bill passed the state House on Thursday, and it still must go through the Senate.
Lincoln County, Nebraska Sheriff Jerome Kramer’s office in North Platte is just more than an hour’s drive to the Colorado border. He said that nearly all the marijuana they seize is from Colorado, and he was surprised to hear that Colorado was considering raising the daily purchase limit.
“Well, it's just gonna make it easier for them to bring larger amounts back here,” said Kramer in an interview. He said if he were the lawmakers “introducing this legislation, I’d be ashamed of myself for moving in that direction. I mean marijuana has already caused enough problems.”
