DENVER — Colorado’s restrictions on marijuana advertising are aimed at protecting impressionable children. A local man said the laws are failing and the loopholes are easy to work around.
Greenfield is now serving dabble extracts,” Scott Carlson, of Aurora, reads a text message his wife received more than a month ago.
“We have two grams of pure fire wax $45,” he reads from his phone.
He said he was surprised to learn it came from a Denver-based marijuana shop they’ve never been to.
“We don`t know how they got the number,” he said.
Carlson and his wife replied to the message, STOP, as instructed in the text to be taken off the mass text database.
“It would stop for a few days then she’d think it was all fixed and then she’d call me and say, got another one,” he said.
The texts keep coming, six of them in total, despite texting and calling to be taken off the list.
“Oh I was livid because it could have been my kid’s phone,” he said. Angry and confused, Carlson called the FOX31 Denver Problem Solvers.
We called the Department of Revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division.
“One of our regulatory goals is to do everything we can to keep marijuana out of the hands of anyone who`s under 21 years of age,” said Lewis Koski, the Department of Revenue’s Deputy Senior Director of Enforcement.
Trying to prevent pot ads from reaching kids, a law was put on the books two years ago banning recreational marijuana shops from using texts to advertise.
“If you use text messaging in a broadcast way to send messages to large numbers of phones its really difficult to be certain that you are not reaching someone who is under 21 years of age,” said Koski.
But here’s the catch, the pot shop sending the texts is medicinal, and the law doesn’t apply to medical marijuana.
“If they are picking numbers at random it could have really been a kid,” Carlson said.
He said the loophole for medical marijuana shops needs to be changed.
“If they had picked my number and my office or work had found out, it`s a taboo at the office, I could have got fired,” he said.
The Department of Revenue said there is some interest in this year’s general assembly to consider making the law on marijuana text ads the same for both recreational and medicinal shops.