Minnesota legalized recreational marijuana on Tuesday, raising concerns that teenagers' access to the drug will increase, as well as mental health problems among young adults.

Marijuana was legalized on the heels of reports connecting marijuana usage in young people to depression, suicidality, schizophrenia, psychosis, addiction, and other mental health concerns.

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In the past, marijuana consumers had been dealing with a "much lower-potency product," Republican Minnesota state Sen. Jim Abeler told the Washington Examiner, explaining that the bill, which legalizes recreational marijuana use at the age of 21, does not consider the effect of marijuana on human brain development.

"When it's 21, middle schoolers are going to get it," Abeler said, adding that former Gov. Jesse Ventura wanted the age to be 18.

While the bill provides funding for treatment, prevention, and education, Abeler explained that there was not enough money and that "treatment is going to be incomplete because there's no way to fix people who have become heavy smokers at age 16 when their neural synapses cease to function with this high-potency product."

A higher risk comes as the potency of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive compound in marijuana, has increased substantially. In 1995, the average potency was at about 4%. By 2008, it had more than doubled to nearly 9%, which increased to 12% in 2014, and then to over 17% in 2017.

At the same time, teen marijuana use has increased 245% over the past two decades, according to a study conducted by Oregon Health & Science University, and the trend of state legalization of marijuana has been connected to the increase in teen usage.

According to Jennifer Bailey, the lead author of the state legalization teen usage study, rates of marijuana use among teenagers before legalization had actually been decreasing. However, because legalization brings the proliferation of stores and adult usage, teenagers have increased access to the drug, which Bailey says "can have a lot of negative health consequences."

Commenting on a study he conducted, Columbia University professor of clinical psychiatry Ryan Sultan said, "We were surprised to see that cannabis use had such strong associations to adverse mental health and life outcomes for teens who did not meet the criteria for having a substance use condition," explaining the typical perception among many is that "casual cannabis use is benign."

"The science supports that the age of first use should be above 21," Sultan told the Washington Examiner. "Public health information needs to be available to youth about the adverse associations cannabis has for them."

Explaining that the relationship between mental health and cannabis use is still not fully understood, Sultan said, "It seems to me that cannabis legalization needs to proceed with more caution and safeguards for youth."

"Proponents are being grossly irresponsible," Abeler told the Washington Examiner, casting doubt on the effectiveness of the law's prevention and treatment provisions. "I'm shocked at the Department of Health in Minnesota."

"There is a reckoning coming that the excited proponents are not recognizing," Abeler, who supported measures to decriminalize marijuana and has been known to vote with Democrats, continued. "I'm very worried about that."

However, at the signing ceremony, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) said, "A lot of thought has gone into this. A lot of the things learned in other states are incorporated into how we do this, and the thoughtfulness around this legislation gives us a really good guiding principle."

Minnesota is also set to expunge an estimated 66,796 marijuana-related records automatically as part of the bill's effort to clean the criminal histories of its citizens.

That means the public records in cases that ended in either a conviction or were thrown out would be wiped clean from arrest to sentencing, something the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension says could take a year.

The bill also provides that those convicted of felony charges can appeal their cases for review by the newly formed Cannabis Expungement Board. To be expunged, felonies must be for possession and nonviolent offenses.

According to the Bureau, about 300,000 Minnesotans could see their records cleared.

A spokeswoman for the bureau told the Washington Examiner that "these are records — not people," explaining that "we look at the numbers in terms of records because an individual may have more than one affected record."

People who "live in low-income areas that have experienced a disproportionate impact from cannabis prohibition," military veterans who lost honorable status due to marijuana, and those convicted of marijuana-related offenses will also be the state's preferred applicants for business licenses in the new regulatory setup, proponents say, to quell the black market and standardize the product.

Republican lawmakers have criticized the licensure plan as "social equity scores." The new Office of Cannabis Management touts the "social equity" section of the website championed by Democrats.

"They didn't let people who weren't zealots to work on some of this stuff," Abeler said. "It could have been way better laid out, but they had an equity agenda.

"They were angry about blacks who have been put in jail over this and with felonies and whatnot, and so they're reaching out to them to actually do the selling some of the stores and the licenses," he added, adding that many of the arrests happened in Minneapolis and St. Paul, "which is run by, curiously enough, the liberals who could have fixed it."

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Abeler does not have high hopes for the regulatory framework, which he said would "absolutely not" help stop the black market of marijuana sales in Minnesota, citing other states' experiences with similar proposals where "the black market is alive and well."

Walz's office did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.