The first months of legal recreational marijuana in Colorado saw a jump in drug policy violations in public schools, a Rocky Mountain PBS I-News analysis of Department of Education data has found.
Alarmingly, the biggest spike in violations came in the state's middle schools. The first months of legal recreational marijuana coincided with the winter and spring of the 2013-14 school year.
The Dolores School District reported seven incidents, resulting in six suspensions and one expulsion. About 14 percent of reported incidents resulted in explusions, a 75 percent change from the 2012-2013 school year to the 2013-2014 school year.
"Middle-schoolers are most vulnerable to being confused about marijuana," said Dr. Christian Thurstone, attending physician for the Denver Health Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment program. "They think, 'Well, it's legal so it must not be a problem.'"
In many cases, marijuana is simply more available to younger teens, officials say.
"Parents have it in their houses more often, and the kids just can take it from home," said school resource officer Judy Lutkin, of the Aurora Police Department.
The hike in drug violations came as overall suspensions, expulsions and referrals to police for other transgressions decreased between the year of legalization and the previous academic year, 2012-13.
The I-News analysis found:
Middle schools had the highest increase in drug violations, rising 24 percent in the school year ending last spring. This led to a decade-high 951 drug incidents in middle schools.
Drug incidents reported by all public schools hit a decade high last school year, rising 7.4 percent to 5,377 incidents. There are more drug violations in high schools, but those numbers stayed flat in the first year of legalization.
Statewide, since medical marijuana stores opened widely in 2010, drug incidents are the only major category of conduct violations that rose in Colorado school districts, according to the data.
Still, it's hard to discern the specific types of drugs involved in the increased number of reports as statewide policies to measure and extrapolate teen use of marijuana and other drugs are often inconsistent and unreliable.
The data collected by the Colorado Department of Education does not identify specific drugs; it lumps prescription drugs, heroin, cocaine and marijuana into the same category.
Marijuana is second only to alcohol in teen substance abuse, according to the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, an annual survey from the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment.
The Department of Education wants to address the lack of specificity in its drug reporting, according to Rep. Polly Lawrence, R-Littleton. She said she was asked to carry a bill that would require schools to be more transparent with drug reporting, particularly about marijuana.
"We are still continuing with stakeholder meetings, but I am hoping to have a bill drafted and ready to go (this month)," Rep. Lawrence said. "If we don't start now, we are not going to have a baseline to compare to in the future."
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health ranked Colorado as the second-worst state in the country for prescription drug abuse in 2013. That year, 598 people of all ages in the state died from unintentional drug poisoning, according to the Colorado Office of Behavioral Health. That's nearly four times the number of deaths that were caused by drunk driving during the same period.
Still, marijuana remains a top priority for school resource officers and treatment providers, especially in middle schools.
The Colorado Legislature set aside $2.5 million in grants for schools from marijuana tax revenue. As of November 2014, the Department of Education had awarded $975,000 to 11 districts to hire more health professionals to help address student behavior regarding marijuana, sometimes as an alternative to traditional punishment like expulsion or suspension.
But alternative or non-punitive methods currently dealing with drug incidents by districts or individual schools are not tracked by state data.
Even as Colorado has been launched into the national spotlight as the first state to legalize and commercialize the sale of marijuana for adult use, the state has yet to begin collecting comprehensive and consistent data to describe how it is impacting Colorado's teens.