by Christopher Osher and Evan Wyloge, The Denver Gazette, co-published with ProPublica
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In March 2022, Colorado public health officials started getting startling reports of liver damage tied to a new marijuana-based sleep aid that had quickly become a top seller in the state.
But it wasn’t until June 2023, nearly 15 months later, that the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division would warn consumers that the danger had become so serious that the manufacturer had halted production of the sleep pills, called 1906 Midnight Drops, after more reports of “acute liver injury.”
The delay highlights a slew of weaknesses in the system for protecting consumers from hazardous products in the nation’s first regulated recreational marijuana market.
The health complaints had prompted the division to investigate, but the agency decided it didn’t have the power to pull the drops from the stores in this situation. If the agency had dug deeper, it might have found what the state attorney general’s office later discovered: The manufacturer, Sima Sciences, began receiving complaints of harm shortly after it launched 1906 Midnight Drops and two years before health officials ever did.
Instead, the enforcement division took four months after the first report of liver damage to the state to post a notice on its website. But the agency didn’t call it a health and safety warning, which would have advised people not to consume the product. It released a more neutrally named “informational notification.” While there had been reports of “adverse health events,” the notice said, regulators didn’t find any violations.
Jenifer Chatting, a surgical assistant, wanted a safe, natural alternative to pharmaceuticals to treat her insomnia and began taking the Midnight Drops nightly. She continued taking the drops for months until her dispensary stopped stocking them. Now, despite never having liver problems before, she has liver damage at age 53; her doctor says she will ultimately need a transplant.
Colorado’s failure to get Midnight Drops off the market or to warn consumers to stop taking it despite repeated reports of harm was not an anomaly, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica found. In the cases for which the news organizations were able to identify the date of a complaint or the start of an investigation, it took regulators an average of more than seven months to issue a warning — longer than the roughly two months federal investigators have said it should take the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to warn consumers about contaminated food, according to a federal audit.
Unlike other states, Colorado operates largely on an honor code, with manufacturers free to choose the samples and the labs that conduct contaminant tests required before products can be sold. Colorado also allows marijuana manufacturers to test their products far less frequently if they can show consistent compliance, something only one other state does.
Last September, Sima Sciences founder Peter Barsoom and his companies settled with the Colorado attorney general’s office to resolve an investigation into the company. Barsoom and his companies denied that they had violated consumer protection laws but agreed to pay $400,000 in fines, and the settlement bars them from selling cannabis products in Colorado until at least 2027.
“How are people supposed to know this?” Chatting’s husband, Luke, asked. “The only way I found this stuff was by digging and digging and digging on the internet.”
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Denver Gazette. Read the full investigation at ProPublica.