Reporting Highlights
- Not an Anomaly: In the cases we reviewed, Colorado marijuana regulators took over seven months, on average, to warn the public after receiving a complaint or starting an investigation.
- Open Loopholes: Colorado lacks measures adopted in many other marijuana markets to improve testing procedures that prevent contaminated marijuana from going to stores.
- Multiple Chances: Even when the state discovers problems with a product that’s in dispensaries, manufacturers say they often continue selling the product while challenging the findings.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In March 2022, Colorado public health officials started getting startling reports of liver damage tied to a new marijuana-based sleep aid that had quickly become a top seller in the state.
But it wasn’t until June 2023, nearly 15 months later, that the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division would warn consumers that the danger had become so serious that the manufacturer had halted production of the sleep pills, called 1906 Midnight Drops, after more reports of “acute liver injury.”
The delay highlights a slew of weaknesses in the system for protecting consumers from hazardous products in the nation’s first regulated recreational marijuana market.
The health complaints had prompted the division to investigate, but the agency decided it didn’t have the power to pull the drops from the stores in this situation. If the agency had dug deeper, it might have found what the state attorney general’s office later discovered: The manufacturer, Sima Sciences, began receiving complaints of harm shortly after it launched 1906 Midnight Drops and two years before health officials ever did.
Instead, the enforcement division took four months after the first report of liver damage to the state to post a notice on its website. But the agency didn’t call it a health and safety warning, which would have advised people not to consume the product. It released a more neutrally named “informational notification.” While there had been reports of “adverse health events,” the notice said, regulators didn’t find any violations. The manufacturer had reformulated the product, the notice added, and no additional issues had surfaced.
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