Data provided by the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health finds that marijuana use fell significantly year-over-year among those ages 12 to 17.
Tag: youth use
The analysis finds that there has been “no marked increase in cannabis youth by use” in the three-year period following legalization.
“The overall percentage of students who reported using marijuana at least 1 time during the previous 30 days in 2019 was not measurably different from the percentage in 2009…. There was no measurable difference between 2009 and 2019 in the percentage of students who reported that illegal drugs were made available to them on school property.”
“This study found no evidence between 1991 and 2015 of increases in adolescents reporting past 30-day marijuana use or heavy marijuana use associated with state MML [medical marijuana law] enactment or operational MML dispensaries.”
Year-over-year, “the use of marijuana in all forms … by adolescents [nationwide] did not significantly change in any of the three grades [8th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade] for lifetime use, past 12-month use, past 30-day use, [or] daily use.”
Authors “found no evidence that RML [recreational marijuana legalization] was associated with [an] increased likelihood or level of marijuana use among adolescents. Rather, among adolescents who reported any use of marijuana in the past month, the frequency of use declined by 16 percent after RML.”
“To our knowledge, this is the first study examining the effect of recreational legalization of marijuana in the US on adolescent treatment admissions for marijuana use. Our results indicate that RML in Colorado and Washington was not associated with an increase in treatment admissions. Rather, we observe a substantial decline in admissions rates across US states.”
State laws reducing minor marijuana possession offenses from criminal to civil violations (aka decriminalization) are associated with dramatic reductions in drug-related arrests, and are not linked to any uptick in youth cannabis use, according to data published by researchers at Washington University and the National Bureau of Economic Research.