Licensed Marijuana Businesses Consistently Verify Customers’ Age To Prevent Youth Sales, American Academy Of Pediatrics Study Shows

Results of a secret shopper study in New York City indicate that state-licensed marijuana retailers were far more consistent about discouraging youth access to cannabis compared to illicit stores, with regulated outlets consistently verifying the age of would-be buyers as well as avoiding cartoon signage and products that appeal to young people.

The study, published this week in Pediatrics, a journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, looked at 37 retailers randomly selected from 870 across New York City (NYC), where illicit shops outnumber licensed stores. The sample included five medical dispensaries, seven adult-use retailers, 10 unlicensed storefronts and 15 smoke shops.

All of the licensed retailers that were observed checked purchasers’ ID both before store entry and prior to purchase, the study found. Unregulated stores, by contrast, checked IDs before entry only 10 percent of the time, and verified ages before purchase less than half (48 percent) of the time.

Licensed retailers also didn’t use cartoon signage or sell youth-appealing products such as infused energy drinks, soda or candy, whereas unregulated ones commonly did.

Among unlicensed shops, 57 percent employed cartoon signage, 48 percent sold infused energy drinks, 57 percent sold infused sodas and 53 percent sold infused candy, according to the research.

“Licensed retailers were significantly more likely to require age verification before store entry (100% vs 10%, P < .01) and purchase (100% vs 48%, P = .01). Unlicensed retailers displayed more cartoon signage (57% vs 0%) and sold youth-appealing products like energy drinks (48% vs 0%), soda (57% vs 0%), and candy (53% vs 0%).”

“In NYC, unlicensed retailers outnumber licensed ones and often engage in practices increasing youth access to cannabis,” the new paper concludes. “They infrequently verify age, sell cheaper products, and use youth-friendly marketing.”

Purchase prices at licensed shops averaged $11.34 per gram after taxes, the study says, compared to $9.13 at unregulated retailers.

Despite those differences, researchers also found some similarities in store practices. For example, nearly three quarters of all shops were located within two blocks of a K–12 school, including 75 percent of licensed stores and 76 percent of unlicensed ones. Further, only 10 percent of unregulated stores posted signage about cannabis-related health risks, while only 8 percent of regulated stores did.

Meanwhile 58 percent of licensed retailers offered online purchase and delivery compared to 36 percent of unregulated stores.

While sales by unlicensed retailers is illegal statewide in New York, authors of the study said that legalization caused confusion especially in New York City as unregulated stores sprung up to meet consumer demand.

“Overnight, the city went from having a few medical marijuana dispensaries to having a bunch of dispensaries that may or may not have been licensed,” Ryan Sultán, a study co-author and clinical psychiatry professor at Columbia University, said in a Columbia release about the report.

“The findings of this study suggest that legalization in [New York State] was followed by the emergence of a large market of unlicensed retailers operating largely outside of state regulations, risking increased cannabis access and use by youth,” the new research says. “The rollout of legal dispensaries in NYS was slow due to efforts to prioritize entrepreneurs impacted by criminalization, restrictions on medical retailers entering the recreational market, and lawsuits; during this slow rollout, illegal retailers flourished.”

“All licensed retailers verified age with photo ID before permitting store entry, but only 10% of unlicensed retailers required ID for entry.”

Notably, of the smoke shops observed, 73 percent were selling cannabis, the report says, and about half openly displayed cannabis products to shoppers.

Despite the study’s findings that regulated retailers demonstrated perfect compliance around age-verification and avoidance of products or signage that appeals to youth, Sultán contended that legalization itself was to blame for increased access to marijuana among young people.

“Though our findings may not be generalizable to other cities,” he told Columbia, “they show that legalization of recreational cannabis creates a space for young people to purchase cannabis, creating the potential for harm as regulation struggles to keep up.”

The report notes that part of Sultán’s psychiatry practice involves treating teens who use cannabis.

In terms of recommendations, the research suggests that marijuana regulations “include plans for monitoring and controlling storefronts to more effectively protect youth from potential harms of expanded markets.”

Across the U.S., research suggests that marijuana use by young people has generally fallen in states that legalize the drug for adults.

A report from the advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), for example, found that youth marijuana use declined in 19 out of 21 states that legalized adult-use marijuana—with teen cannabis consumption down an average of 35 percent in the earliest states to legalize.

The report cited data from a series of national and state-level youth surveys, including the annual Monitoring the Future (MTF) Survey, which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

The latest version of the MTF, released late last year, found that cannabis use among eighth, 10th and 12 graders is now lower than before the first states started enacting adult-use legalization laws in 2012. There was also a significant drop in perceptions by youth that cannabis is easy to access in 2024 despite the widening adult-use marketplace.

Another recent survey also showed a decline in the proportion of high-school students reporting past-month marijuana use over the past decade, as dozens of states moved to legalize cannabis.

At the state level, MPP’s assessment looked at research such as the Washington State Healthy Youth Survey that was released last April.

That survey showed declines in both lifetime and past-30-day marijuana use in recent years, with striking drops that held steady through 2023. The results also indicated that perceived ease of access to cannabis among underage students has generally fallen since the state enacted legalization for adults in 2012—contrary to fears repeatedly expressed by opponents of the policy change.

In June, meanwhile, the latest biannual Healthy Kids Colorado Survey was published in June found that rates of youth marijuana use in the state declined slightly in 2023—remaining significantly lower than before the state became one of the first in the U.S. to legalize cannabis for adults in 2012.

The findings broadly track with other past surveys that have investigated the relationship between jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana and youth cannabis use.

For example, a Canadian government report recently found that daily or near-daily use rates by both adults and youth have held steady over the last six years after the country enacted legalization.

Another U.S. study reported a “significant decrease” in youth marijuana use from 2011 to 2021—a period in which more than a dozen states legalized marijuana for adults—detailing lower rates of both lifetime and past-month use by high-school students nationwide.

Another federal report published last summer concluded that cannabis consumption among minors—defined as people 12 to 20 years of age—fell slightly between 2022 and 2023.

Separately, a research letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in April said there’s no evidence that states’ adoption of laws to legalize and regulate marijuana for adults have led to an increase in youth use of cannabis.

Another JAMA-published study earlier that month that similarly found that neither legalization nor the opening of retail stores led to increases in youth cannabis use.

In 2023, meanwhile, a U.S. health official said that teen marijuana use has not increased “even as state legalization has proliferated across the country.”

Another earlier analysis from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that rates of current and lifetime cannabis use among high school students have continued to drop amid the legalization movement.

A separate NIDA-funded study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2022 also found that state-level cannabis legalization was not associated with increased youth use. The study demonstrated that “youth who spent more of their adolescence under legalization were no more or less likely to have used cannabis at age 15 years than adolescents who spent little or no time under legalization.”

Yet another 2022 study from Michigan State University researchers, published in the journal PLOS One, found that “cannabis retail sales might be followed by the increased occurrence of cannabis onsets for older adults” in legal states, “but not for underage persons who cannot buy cannabis products in a retail outlet.”

The trends were observed despite adult use of marijuana and certain psychedelics reaching “historic highs” in 2022, according to separate 2023 data.

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