State department agree with findings, but highlighted recent 99% compliance rate for underage sales rules

More than 1-in-3 new retail marijuana stores, or 40 out of 112, were not inspected within a year of being licensed, an audit of the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division found.

It also did not inspect about a third of the stores targeted for inspections, or 182 out of 567, either because they were new or had not been inspected for two years or more.

The audit looked at the division’s activities between fiscal years 2019 and 2022. Statistics cited in the audit show a precipitous drop in targeted inspections and underage compliance in the fiscal year beginning in July 2020 — when the pandemic was upending day-to-day society — and that they haven’t quite recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

“I’m glad that (auditors) pointed the finger at the department in that they dropped the ball,” state Sen. Kevin Priola, a Henderson Democrat who asked for the audit, said, adding that the department “didn’t deliver what the voters expected when they legalized marijuana.”

The audit also found that the division was not checking every store it prioritized for inspection of underage sales, though it did check most of them. About 88% of the stores prioritized were inspected, leaving 75 shops that were not. A retail store was prioritized to check for compliance with underage sales laws if it had never had a check, had not had a compliance check in a timeframe set by internal targets, or failed a previous compliance check. [Read More @ The Denver Post]