A recent fact-finding trip to Colorado has eased one city councilor’s fears about the ramifications of legal retail pot, though she voiced concerns about the overwhelming smell of weed permeating from grow sites.

“I really came back feeling a little less afraid of legalization and the social impacts,” City Councilor Annissa Essaibi-George said during an appearance yesterday on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program. Her comments came after she spent three “jampacked” days meeting with advocates and opponents in the first state in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana.

The former Boston high school teacher said she learned Denver hasn’t seen a significant uptick in pot use among students compared to the early 2000s, when medicinal marijuana became legal in the Rocky Mountain State.

“When I met with the school folks, they said two things. When medical marijuana was legalized, they saw a spike but it was anecdotal because they didn’t have baseline data,” Essaibi-George said. “They saw more instances of kids showing up to school high, bringing in the edibles, but they haven’t seen a similar spike since recreational came into play.”

Among the other benefits Essaibi-George said she encountered were a surging population — Denver is growing at a rate of 1,000 people per month — and long-vacant industrial sites that are now being used as growing facilities.

But Essaibi-George did point out some drawbacks, including the fact that many grow sites in Colorado are located in lower-income areas. She also noted the smell.

“It’s wicked, it’s wicked,” Essaibi-George said in her Boston dialect. “It’s like driving through New Jersey with the oil refineries. It’s everywhere.”

Although the ballot question passed in November with 54 percent support, a handful of state legislators in late December voted during an informal session to delay the opening date for recreational pot shops in the state until July 2018.

Essaibi-George said taxing and regulation will need to be worked out in the meantime and Colorado officials offered hints for the Bay State.

“If you tax it too high, the black market will still exist,” she said. “We were told early on, we should be as restrictive as possible in the amount individuals can grow at home because if you set that number too high, it’s much harder to go the other way.”