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The latest installment of an annual federal drug use survey finds that teen marijuana use is on the decline even as state legalization laws are going into effect.
The results of the Monitoring the Future study, released Tuesday, show that 24 percent of 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders say they’ve used marijuana in the past year, compared with 26 percent in last year’s survey.
Coming in the wake of Colorado and Washington State’s rollout of systems of legal marijuana sales to adults, the findings are contrary to often repeated prohibitionist claims that legalization means youth use will skyrocket.
For example, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, recently wrote that “Legalization will likely increase the already substantial proportion of teens that use marijuana regularly and thus put themselves at a competitive disadvantage in school and life.”
But the new study, conducted at by the University of Michigan with federal funds from Volkow’s agency, finds that past month marijuana use has actually dropped 1.4 percentage points in the past year among 10th-graders and 1.6 percentage points among high-school seniors.
Legalization advocates have long dismissed prohibitionist fears about the “message” that legalization will send to young people, pointing out that only in a legal, regulated market are sellers incentivized to check the ID’s of their customers to ensure they are of age. They also point out that cigarette use has dropped dramatically within the past several decades due to health-focused campaigns and not as a result of any adults being put in handcuffs and sent to jail for tobacco use.
In a press release, the researchers behind the new study write that the percentage of 8th and 10th graders who say marijuana is easy to obtain “is down significantly since 2013,” which they say “may help to explain the modest decline in use this year.”
The results of the Monitoring the Future study, released Tuesday, show that 24 percent of 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders say they’ve used marijuana in the past year, compared with 26 percent in last year’s survey.
Coming in the wake of Colorado and Washington State’s rollout of systems of legal marijuana sales to adults, the findings are contrary to often repeated prohibitionist claims that legalization means youth use will skyrocket.
For example, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, recently wrote that “Legalization will likely increase the already substantial proportion of teens that use marijuana regularly and thus put themselves at a competitive disadvantage in school and life.”
But the new study, conducted at by the University of Michigan with federal funds from Volkow’s agency, finds that past month marijuana use has actually dropped 1.4 percentage points in the past year among 10th-graders and 1.6 percentage points among high-school seniors.
Legalization advocates have long dismissed prohibitionist fears about the “message” that legalization will send to young people, pointing out that only in a legal, regulated market are sellers incentivized to check the ID’s of their customers to ensure they are of age. They also point out that cigarette use has dropped dramatically within the past several decades due to health-focused campaigns and not as a result of any adults being put in handcuffs and sent to jail for tobacco use.
In a press release, the researchers behind the new study write that the percentage of 8th and 10th graders who say marijuana is easy to obtain “is down significantly since 2013,” which they say “may help to explain the modest decline in use this year.”
