Study: Many online marijuana dispensaries do not require age verification

Key takeaways:

• In the United States, 18.8% of online marijuana dispensaries do not require age verification.
• Most websites accept nontraceable payment methods, enabling kids to hide their transactions.

Nearly one in five online marijuana dispensaries in the United States require no formal age verification at any stage of the purchasing process, according to study findings reported in JAMA Pediatrics.

Additionally, most of the websites accept nontraceable payment options that allow children to hide their purchases, researchers found.

Study findings reported earlier this year showed that marijuana use decreased among high schoolers in 2021. Other studies have shown that self-medication with cannabis can lead to problematic use in young people, that anxiety and depression were more common among teens who vaped marijuana and that teen asthma might be rising in states with legalized use of cannabis.

“Our research team is a group of undergraduate students who look into troubling health trends among adolescents, and this is one we felt was compelling enough to look into,” Ruth L. Milanaik, DO, a developmental and behavioral health specialist at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Lake Success, New York, told Healio.

Between July 1, 2022, and June 15, 2023, Milanaik and colleagues created a list of Google search terms to identify online marijuana dispensaries that sold to U.S. consumers, and collected data on various attributes of the sites, such as “if a site verified a user prior to entering the website and prior to checkout,” Milanaik said.

The researchers found 80 online marijuana dispensaries based in 32 states, and recorded their policies and products. Of the websites, 70% prompted users to click yes to confirm they were of legal age, and 3.8% asked for a specific birth date, but none required a verified age documentation to enter the website.

Further, 66.3% required users to verify age when completing a purchase or on a receipt of a marijuana product, accepting options such as government-issued identification (50%), a medical marijuana identification number (26.3%) and self-reported birthdate (10%), but 18.8% did not require age verification at any part of the process.

In terms of products, 92.5% of the dispensaries offered e-cigarettes, and 93.8% offered edibles such as gummies or other candies (96%), nonalcoholic beverages (53.3%) and chocolates (78.7%).

Local delivery was offered by 67.5% of the dispensaries, and 66.3% offered pickup. Additionally, 27.5% of the dispensaries offered out-of-state delivery. Of this group, 95% said they could deliver to states with differing marijuana laws than the state where the dispensary was located.

Although 67.5% of the dispensaries listed policies regarding sales of marijuana to minors, 24% of these websites did not ask users to verify their age to enter the website, and 24% did not ask users to verify their age in order to purchase or receive the product. In regard to payment, 83.8% of dispensaries offered nontraceable payment methods such as prepaid cards or cryptocurrency and 5% offered student discounts.

“We were most surprised by the offers to ship across states and the vague language on many of these websites,” Milanaik said. “The lack of age verification was surprising, but not unexpected, as we knew that age verification tactics were lacking on many alcohol and e-cigarette sites as well from reading previous research.”

Milanaik added that pediatricians should be aware of this issue and “continue to discuss the dangers of marijuana use with their adolescent patients and advise parents to monitor their child's online and transactional histories.”

“We would love to see future studies comparing the age verification tactics [for] alcohol, marijuana and e-cigarettes to see how to best protect minors from accessing these products online,” Milanaik said.