The American Journal of Public Health reported that more than 50 percent of adolescents born between 1956 and 1965 admit to having experimented with marijuana. This figure compares with just over two percent of teens born between 1930 and 1940.
“Although only a small minority of American adolescents used marijuana in the years leading up to the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937, literally half of the ‘baby boomer’ population tried the drug as teenagers after its use had been prohibited for decades,” Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of The NORML Foundation, observed.
The authors propose that the steady decline in two-parent families may have contributed to the rise in marijuana use after World war II.
Researchers based their findings on data from the government-sponsored National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
For more information, please contact Richard Cowan @ MarijuanaNews.com or see the American Journal of Public Health, 1998; 88 (1): 27-33.
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