this spokane church may want to hook up with the idiots next to uncle ikes.

I presume the democratic majority will shoot this down.

How can you say "teens don't have easier access" to pot? Fake IDs, 21 year old friends and adults buying and then selling weed products are making access a hell of a lot easier. You think teens are still getting their weed from the guy in the alley who knows a grower? Don't dismiss other people's claims by spewing your own nonsense. You wanted legal weed. You -- and everyone else -- has it.

@2 Because there are studies debunking the claim that they have increased access? And that legalizations may have actually reduced teen use in CO?

Access: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20…

Use: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014…

I think you're right to say that they aren't getting it exclusively from "the plug" these days, and that some legal weed is making it into the hands of kids, but legal weed hasn't been shown to increase the overall amount of pot going into teenaged lungs. Also, I'd like to remind you that the guy in the alley didn't check ID at all, fake or otherwise. Legalization, despite its many problems (of which teen use is a small one at best), is still a major step forward.

The real spewers of nonsense, my friend, are the commenters who get online to denigrate journalists by making whatever claim they want, citations and supporting evidence be damned.

Dismiss anecdotal evidence at your own intellectual peril. Teens are smoking/vaping/eating "legal" weed. This article offers no citations or supporting evidence demonstrating otherwise. And to venture further into the land of hearsay, I'd bet most of the pot shop bouncers don't give a shit who comes in as long as they have id and cash.

@4 You're getting really deep into the land of hearsay, my friend. Here's the boots on the ground. Yesterday, I was doing interviews at Stash when a gangly looking kid walked in and tried to pass off a fake Idaho ID. Two minutes later, they sent the kid packing and the store's buying manager was making confetti out of it as we continued our interview. Uncle Ike's recently sent me a PDF of seized IDs. Fourteen in two weeks.

They do give a shit, and they're doing a lot more to keep pot out of the hands of kids than the black market ever was. If you're so concerned with kids using pot, and you're so into anecdotal evidence, here's mine: I had an easier time getting pot in high school than I do now as a pot journalist. Now, because I try to patronize legal stores to help make this whole experiment work, I have to take the bus to the pot store. In high school, there was a dealer at my school every single day. Talk about convenient. Oh and he didn't check ID.

Long and short of it is that kids will get pot if they want pot. That's obvious and you've wildly misinterpreted my points if you think I'm saying that legalization will prevent that. They've been getting pot for decades, and legal stores aren't doing much to change that. However, they are introducing a couple more hoops to jump through (buying a good fake, bugging your older brother, etc.). Not to mention a few safety controls on the product. Sure, in an ideal world, kids would wait to smoke until their weird little brains stopped developing. But they don't. If they're gonna smoke pot, I'd goddamn well rather have them smoke something that can pass microbial and occasionally gets screened for pesticides. Harm reduction, baby, get with it.