If the incoming Liberal government fulfills a campaign promise to legalize marijuana Canadian officials can look to Colorado to understand the challenges and how to deal with them.
That's not a luxury that Colorado officials had in 2014, when it became the first state in the United States to regulate marijuana, from the production phase to sales.
"The biggest challenge was being amongst the first to really endeavour to go down this path of marijuana legalization," Lewis Koski, director of the state's Marijuana Enforcement Division said. "When we first got started, there just was not a lot of information out there for us to base our policy decisions off of."
Lewis told CTV's Canada AM on Tuesday that officials were presented with "some unique challenges" as they worked through developing the regulations and he cautioned that the incoming Liberal government could face similar challenges.
"It's not that it's insurmountable," Lewis said. "It's just that there's going to be a lot of effort and hard work that goes into those policy decisions."
Lewis said state officials quickly set out three goals that directed marijuana policy: to keep marijuana out of the hands minors, to limit the amount of criminal activity in the regulated environment, and to ensure accountability for the product.
"Ultimately, (to ensure) that the product ends up being much safer for consumers compared to black market products," Lewis said.
He said one challenge Colorado officials did not anticipate was the sudden growth of edible marijuana products in the marketplace, including baked goods and candy infused with marijuana concentrate.
"They just weren't really intuitive to the consumer for them to be able to understand how much (marijuana) they were consuming in a particular portion," Lewis said.
How to test for drug-impaired driving and how much sales tax to charge on marijuana products are other areas that may present policy challenges.
