Here's a friendly reality check for parents in Colorado Spring who worry that a medical marijuana dispensary opening in the strip mall a quarter mile away will lead their child to the life of a dopefiend.

No one under 18 can even enter one of these facilities without being a card-carrying medical marijuana patient. A facility owner who distributes marijuana to someone who isn't carrying a card faces felony drug charges. This makes dispensary owners very careful about who they deal with. The security cameras and locks on the doors are there to keep the uninvited out.

The average age of a medical marijuana patient in Colorado is 40, and most of those who use it are ill people, worried about the stigma attached to the medical treatment they choose. They're not loitering around strip malls, riding skateboards and spray-painting walls, or drawing attention to themselves. They're not criminals, or the "criminal element." They might even be the wife of your neighbor, who is suffering through chemotherapy. They just need a place to pick up their medicine and go home.

Thus, the school-age children of Colorado Springs have a far, far easier time scoring marijuana and other elicit drugs in their schools, or from Facebook friends, than from a medical marijuana dispensary. If concerned parents want to direct their anxieties in a more rational and productive direction, they should turn their attention to drug sources much closer to home. If the attorney general and other law enforcers are really interested in protecting kids from drugs, they should devote more time to crushing Mexican drug cartels than to bothering medical marijuana providers and their patients.