An effort to keep high-potency marijuana concentrates out of the hands of teenagers on Thursday cleared the House and is now on to the Senate with broad bipartisan support as well as a smattering of bipartisan opposition.

But even among those who supported House Bill 1317, debate ahead of the final vote was at times contentious with a Republican lawmaker contending one of his Democratic colleagues accused him of racism.

The bill brought by Speaker Alec Garnett, D-Denver, and Reps. Yadira Caraveo, D-Thornton, and Tim Geitner, R-Falcon, seeks to pump funding into research efforts to study the effect of high-potency THC products on the developing brain. Among a host of other provisions, the bill also lowers the daily purchase limits on concentrates for medical patients and recreational consumers and requires the Metrc seed-to-sale tracking system to be updated to tie purchases to a medical patient’s identification number in real time, rather than at the end of each day.

That’s the main provision of the bill designed to prevent “looping,” when a patient buys up to their daily limit at one dispensary before heading to another to again buy up to their daily limit before the system updated.

According to Garnett, looping by 18-year-old medical card holders is the main way high-potency THC products are making their way into the hands of underage students.

“Colorado has been at the forefront of legalization, that means that we are on the forefront of being responsible when it comes to regulating the products that come out of legalization,” Garnett said. “This body has not done enough to make sure that we aren’t creating a gray market on our high school campuses.”

The bill passed on a 56-8 vote with one member excused. The opponents included two Democrats — Reps. Chris Kennedy of Lakewood and Edie Hooton of Boulder — and six Republicans. Eighteen of the House’s 24 Republican lawmakers voted in favor of the legislation, joining 38 of the chamber’s 41 Democrats. The one member who was excused from the final vote, Broomfield Democratic Rep. Matt Gray, voted against the bill when it was before the House Finance Committee.

Ahead of the final vote, Rep. Leslie Herod, D-Denver, delivered a stinging rebuke of the war on drugs. She pointed to 1940s-era anti-marijuana crusader Harry Anslinger, who she said kicked off the war on drugs “using fear and racist rhetoric to scare the public about cannabis.”

“It is because of the racist roots of prohibition and the poisonous rhetoric and policies that destroyed communities and families of color for generations that I caution my colleagues that we must be mindful of that history when we work together to improve upon the historic policies that Colorado has created,” she said. “We should not be a body that embraces the politics of fear and echoes in rhetoric or agitation and alarm to our constituency.”

Rep. Shane Sandridge also cited the war on drugs among his reason for voting against the bill.

“What I’m concerned about is that we understand history and don’t go back and make the same mistakes twice,” the Colorado Springs Republican said. “It seems like in many ways we’re having conversations that we’ve had decades ago that have failed.”

Unlike Sandridge, Herod praised the legislation as “a step forward” and was among the broad bipartisan coalition of lawmakers voting in support.

So was Rep. Andres Pico, R-Colorado Springs, who indicated “strong support” for the bill. But Pico, who said he spent a couple decades fighting the war on drugs, took exception to Herod’s comments.

“We keep hearing about how this is disproportionate on communities of color, we hear about how the war on drugs and those of us who were involved in it were racist and I’ve had it,” he said ahead of calling for the chamber’s rules on decorum and impugning the motives of fellow lawmakers to be enforced against Herod.

“I’m not going to tolerate without a response the continued accusations of racism against those of us who were involved in enforcing this nation’s laws. Racism has absolutely nothing to do with what we did.”

Speaker Pro Tem Adrienne Benavidez, D-Denver, proceeded to move on debate on the bill on Geitner and then to Garnett, who addressed the concerns Pico raised.

“What was being said was nothing about any one individual. It was about a culture of the past and that culture of the past is not reflected in [HB] 1317 and is certainly not a place that we all want to go back to,” he said ahead of offering to speak with Pico personally about the matter.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where it will still need to work through the legislative process.