Happy New Year! Here Are Some of the 40,000 New Laws Taking Effect Today

Welcome to 2014. If you’re an extraordinarily pale teenager in Illinois or Oregon, you may not use a tanning facility without express medical reasoning from a doctor. And if you’re 21+ in Colorado, you may now legally buy and sell marijuana. Those are just a few of the new laws that went into effect today: Jan. 1, 2014.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, roughly 40,000 new state laws take effect today. Last year we chronicled a handful of strange rules and regulations, and in continuing that tradition, here are a few highlights from this year’s batch of new laws.

None of them are outright bizarre, but several of them are quite controversial and/or interesting at face value:

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[Images via Shutterstock]

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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