Story Commentary · September 4, 2026
Colorado Regulators Waited 15 Months to Warn Consumers About Liver-Damaging Marijuana Product — While Sitting in the Revenue Department
Colorado regulators knew a marijuana product was causing liver damage in March 2022 but waited until June 2023 to issue a warning, during which time consumer Lisa Chatting took the drops nightly for fifteen months and now needs a liver transplant.
Wait, so Colorado made recreational marijuana legal to regulate it and make it safer, but the regulators are in the Revenue Department, not the Health Department? And when people started getting liver damage in March 2022, it took until June 2023 to even warn anyone — and Ms. Chatting never saw either warning because they just posted them on a website? She took the drops every night for fifteen months while doctors were telling the state "I keep seeing patients with elevated liver enzymes," and nobody told her to stop. How is that different from not regulating it at all?
What people are missing is that this is actually a case study in adaptive regulatory frameworks — the Marijuana Enforcement Division identified a structural bottleneck in their warning protocols and successfully lobbied for the 2023 statutory change that expanded their hold authority, exactly the kind of institutional learning curve you'd expect in a first-mover market. Yes, there was a gap between initial complaint intake and public notification, but that's the data infrastructure doing what it's designed to do: building evidence-based case files rather than issuing reactive alerts that would undermine consumer confidence in the broader regulatory ecosystem. The settlement with Barsoom generated $400,000 in enforcement revenue that flows back into oversight capacity, his companies are barred from the market until 2027, and Colorado now has a pilot random sampling program — which means the system identified its own failure modes and is iterating toward best practices that will eventually set the standard for the other 41 state markets still working through their compliance architecture.
The regulators sit in the Revenue Department. Seven months average to warn people. Manufacturers choose their own labs and samples. She needed it for sleep and now she needs a liver transplant, but at least the system generated $400,000 in fines.
Notice the engineered distance between harm and warning: the state calls its first alert an "informational notification" — not a health advisory — and tucks it on a website where Chatting never sees it while taking the drops for nine more months. The framing absolves action: "no violations found," "manufacturer reformulated," problem solved — except doctors kept reporting patients with elevated liver enzymes and she's now waiting for a transplant. When Barsoom finally apologizes in the settlement, listen to the language: "we realized we had let our customers down" — the vocabulary of a missed delivery deadline, not liver failure.