I buy marijuana for an online educational resource.
Through my secret shopping of recreational marijuana products, I’ve purchased a candy bar named after a Disney movie and a vaporizer for a marijuana strain named after a Girl Scout cookie. I have purchased mass-produced candy sprayed with THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, and THC e-cigarettes with fruity flavors that resemble crayons.
My organization, One Chance to Grow Up, is a national nonprofit group that began in Colorado after voters became the first in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana. Our focus is limiting the harm to children from expanding marijuana commercialization.
Retail recreational sales began in Colorado in 2014. Reports of children 5 years and younger with marijuana exposure quadrupled between 2013 and 2019. That’s an all-too-predictable result of THC products deliberately designed to look and taste like delicious candy.
Colorado also saw a statistically significant increase from 2015 to 2017 in high school marijuana users preferring edibles, according to the state’s comprehensive “Healthy Kids Colorado Survey.” The rate jumped from 2% in 2015 to 10% in 2017 and held steady in 2019.
Because of those statistics and the obvious appeal of such products to children, One Chance to Grow Up began in 2018 to document the products sold in Colorado stores and make those photographs available to the public at THCPhotos.org.
In almost 10 years, Colorado regulators have been unable to stop the marketing of increasingly high-potency marijuana to children. And the industry has not policed itself.
Our secret shopping has since expanded to eight more states, and so has evidence that the marijuana industry continues to sell products that appeal to children.
National statistics already show that children are being harmed by marijuana commercialization. An analysis of the National Poison Control Data System marijuana exposure reports for 2017-2019 found that over 1 in 3 edible exposures involved children.
A study recently showed that Canada has a problem with marijuana edibles as well, despite its stricter packaging regulations. Ontario saw an increase in accidental overdoses and emergency room visits for children under 10 after legalization. ER visits increased by nine times in the month after sales began for edibles. Ten percent of all hospital visits of children for poisonings were for cannabis.
Monitoring the Future, an annual survey of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders conducted by the University of Michigan, found in 2019 that THC vaping increased in all grades. Past-month vaping of THC among 12th graders nearly doubled in a single year, it reported — “the second largest increase ever measured for any substance monitored by MTF.”
What was the largest increase? The teen vaping epidemic that exploded after flavored nicotine liquids entered the market.
Any federal protection for marijuana producers must include federal protections for children. With freedom comes responsibility. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s 2021 discussion draft for marijuana reform would prohibit flavors “other than cannabis” in marijuana vaporizers. This would be a good start. The limitation of flavors in order to discourage underage tobacco use got a recent boost from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
But this will not go far enough to protect children, should the marijuana industry be granted access to capital markets or become legal at the federal level.
Today’s marijuana is not limited to joints and e-cigs. Nicotine is never sprinkled on or infused into foods, but marijuana is. The underregulated marijuana industry goes a step further than the tobacco industry by adding sugar along with candy and fruit flavors that appeal to young palates.
That is a recipe for more use by youth.
I have seen many bad trends in my secret shopping, including unprecedented amounts of concentrated high-potency THC being deceptively hidden in candy. But I have seen some good ones too. In Washington state, you can buy capsulated THC oil that forgoes the colors, flavors, and sweeteners that make marijuana appealing to children. Policymakers and health agencies can and should require such product limits, along with limits on serving amounts and important warnings, if Congress proceeds with reforming federal marijuana laws.
Rachel O’Bryan authored a white paper, “Kids are Caught in the Web Spun from Marijuana-infused Sweets: Best Practices to Untangle the Web.” She co-founded One Chance to Grow Up, the only nonprofit group dedicated solely to protecting children in the age of legal marijuana.
