Dear Friend,
You may have seen the usual suspects in the pro-pot blogosphere trumpeting a recent study claiming to find marijuana legalization was not associated with an increase in youth marijuana use. It should be pointed out that these researchers — who are funded by the pro-all drug legalization Charles Koch Foundation — have always found a way to reach this conclusion and their findings run counter to a multitude of evidence to the contrary.
Let’s set the record straight when it comes to youth marijuana use, shall we?
Research published last summer (Bailey et al, 2020) found that the legalization of marijuana has reversed a decades-long pattern of declines in marijuana use and found teens may be more likely to use marijuana following legalization than they otherwise would have been.
In a direct pushback against studies claiming youth marijuana use is not impacted by legalization, study authors pointed out that faulty methodology may be to blame.
Interestingly, a study that came out just days after the Koch-funded study (Lee et al, 2021) took a look at the only two noncontiguous states in the country, Alaska and Hawaii, and compared their rates of youth marijuana use between 2009 and 2019. It found that while current marijuana use in youth was in decline both in Alaska and Hawaii.
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But as you can see from the chart above, Alaska’s legalization of the drug in 2015 suddenly caused an increase in use that has sustained while such use in Hawaii has continued to decline.
Dialing down even further, the 2020 release of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health — the gold standard of youth use data — found double-digit increases in past-year marijuana use amongst 12-17 year-olds in several legal states in California, Nevada, and Oregon since 2017.
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Furthermore, the NSDUH data also shows us that the rate of past-month and past-year marijuana use among 12-17-year-olds in states where marijuana is legal is 8% higher than in states where the substance remains illegal. |
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These findings are even more staggering when they are juxtaposed with the fact that this same data set finds youth substance use of all other substances is continuing to decline.
Looking at NSDUH data from 2008 to 2016, this study found that the prevalence of past-year Cannabis Use Disorder among those 12-17 saw a 25% greater increase in states where marijuana was “legalized” versus states where it remained illegal.
The second gold standard survey for understanding youth substance use is the Monitoring the Future Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan. Both the 2019 & 2020 releases of MTF data found some significant takeaways.
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According to 2019 data from MTF, marijuana vaping among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders has more than doubled since 2017 and daily marijuana use among 8th and 10th graders has seen a significant increase since 2018.
More than one-fifth of 12th and 10th graders reported using marijuana in the past year and the doubling of past-month use in high school seniors constituted the second-largest one-year increase in drug use recorded by the survey.
Furthermore, the 2020 release of MTF data found increases in daily marijuana use amongst the following populations since 2017:
12th graders: a 17% increase
10th graders: a 52% increase
8th graders: a 37% increase
Finally, the 2020 MTF also shows us that near-daily marijuana use among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders now greatly surpasses the use of alcohol and cigarettes among our nation's youth.
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As you can see, the decades-long decline of marijuana use rates has ended, and we have begun to see a reversing of the trend and significant increases in use (a finding supported by Bailey et al, 2020) that we cannot allow ourselves to ignore due to a manipulated view of the data.
Where we used to see year over year declines in use, it has now become the norm to see either steady rates, non-significant increases, or even in some cases dramatic, significant increases in use rates among young people.
One final point worth considering is presented with another study you may have noticed this week. The study in question was yet another report claiming to find that the rate of use of recreational marijuana was no higher after legalization than it was before. Of note, this study only looked at data from 2008 to 2017.
As has been pointed out above, many states have reported significant increases across many different data sets since 2017. This again begs the importance of paying close attention to data as it is presented, it could be tremendously flawed.
We must do everything in our power to counter the prevailing narrative from the marijuana industry and its promoters that legalization has not had an effect on youth use of the drug.
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Dr. Kevin Sabet
President
Smart Approaches to Marijuana
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