Colorado released landmark — but temporary — rules for the operation of recreational marijuana stores on Monday, providing finer detail to the state’s new legal pot industry but leaving many of the most complicated subjects untouched.

The rules mean Colorado joins Washington as the first two states to issue administration regulations for an unprecedented legal marijuana industry open to anyone over 21. The new rules govern everything from how a store obtains a license to how it transports marijuana to what types of packaging pot must be sold in. But the rules don’t address the details of how a store tracks its marijuana inventory or how crucial marijuana-potency testing will work. The rules also don’t resolve questions over some aspects of marijuana labeling and advertising.

Among the more notable regulations in the rules:

• Recreational marijuana stores and medical-marijuana dispensaries can’t operate out of the same shop unless the dispensary refuses to serve people under 21.

• Marijuana and marijuana-infused products must be sold in child-proof packaging.

• Marijuana products must be labeled with the license numbers of the producer that makes them and the store that sells them, as well as a to-be-determined “universal symbol, indicating that the container holds marijuana.”

The rules, though, are ultimately placeholders that state officials hope to have rewritten by the time any recreational marijuana stores actually open in January 2014. The first-draft “emergency rules” were released Monday to comply with a deadline set in Amendment 64, the measure voters approved in November that legalized marijuana retail sales to people over 21.

The, coincidentally, 64 pages of emergency rules are set to expire in late October, and state officials have already announced a more in-depth rulemaking process to spell out more robust regulation of the new industry.

“Our work is not done and we will continue to move forward and provide our state with a well-regulated industry that maintains a clear focus on public safety,” Barbara Brohl, executive director of the Colorado Department of Revenue, said in a statement.

Brohl credited a collaboration between lawmakers, state officials, industry advocates and concerned citizens with helping her department issue the emergency rules in time. The department had about a month after Gov. John Hickenlooper signed several marijuana-related bills in late May to publish the emergency rules.

In part because of that tight deadline, the rules released Monday build off of the framework legislators established with sometimes little elaboration.

Rules related to marijuana advertising, health and safety protections, labeling, inventory control and testing all contain notices that additional regulation in those areas is likely. The lack of detail on inventory control — the so-called “seed-to-sale” tracking system — is especially noticeable since such a system is the linchpin of Colorado’s plans to keep retail marijuana from leaking into the black market.

Instead, the new rules say stores must have some way of documenting their inventory but don’t say precisely how.

“The State Licensing Authority intends to engage in additional rulemaking to establish additional inventory tracking system requirements,” the rules state.

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said the lack of detail is troubling and said he hopes the Department of Revenue — which will oversee the recreational marijuana industry — provides more guidance in its permanent rules.

“Seed-to-sale tracking seems to be at the center of everything, and it’s not in here,” he said Monday during a meeting with The Denver Post’s editorial board.

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold