Colorado voters supported an initiative to put legalized recreational marijuana into the state constitution,
which no other state had ever done before.
If states are the laboratories of democracy, then this is one of the great social experiments of the first half of this century.
I'm still telling other governors when they ask, you know, don't, I wouldn't jump into this.
There are some bits of advice I give freely, and that's to make sure they don't make the same mistakes we did.
Edibles. You've got to regulate the living daylights out of edibles.
We had lots of kids those first couple of years getting into edibles and ending up in the emergency room in hospitals.
And so now we require all edibles to be in tamperproof re-closable, you know, containers that infants and toddlers can't get into.
We also talked to other states about making sure you get a good baseline, right?
We were worried that we'd get more people driving while high.
We started doing that with just simple urine tests that measure THC in your blood for up to 30 days.
That turns out not to be a very good test. We didn't have very good baseline.
So now all of a sudden people think, well, there's more people driving while high because we had an artificially low baseline.
We just didn't measure it successfully.
One of our big concerns was that by legalizing it, we would encourage teenagers, you know, this isn't so dangerous.
This isn't something anybody should worry about.
Well except for seniors, uh, and the trick there is that we think that it's either arthritis, pains of growing old,
they don't want to do opioids or you know, maybe they're baby boomers coming home to roost.
This kind of experiment needs more support and we really can't do it without the federal government.
At this point. I mean, more than two thirds of the citizens of America live in a state that is either legalized medical or recreational marijuana,
if you really wanted to make sure that a new industry was gonna be corrupt,
one of the things you could do is, is demand that everything be in cash because cash is hard to trace.
It's just an invitation for corruption and organized gang activity.
So hopefully we can get Congress to begin to create just some level playing fields that allow
people in the marijuana industry to use charge cards and to write checks and not carry around the leases and bags of cash.
This social experiment that we're going through is going to be making sure we have the right data
so we can adjust our rules and regulations and at the same time make sure that there are not unintended consequences.
