A new US study has rebuked a popular but controversial claim that cannabis legalisation would lead to increased cannabis use among teenagers.
Marijuana Moment says that a federal report published by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that there’d been “no measurable difference” in the percentage of those high school students who reported cannabis use at least once in the past 30 days between 2009 and 2019.
Also, as the paper reports, according to the analysed surveys, students hadn’t accessed the drug – by being offered, sold or gifted on school grounds – in the previous 30 days.
The researchers said that in 2009, when there were no legal adult-use cannabis markets in the US, 21 per cent of high school students reported past 30-day use. The first legal cannabis market opened in Colorado in 2014, but the number was still at only 22% in 2019.
Moreover, data shows that general cannabis use among adults has also remained stable since some U.S. states have introduced a regulated market.
Marijuana Moment reported last year that consumption hadn’t significantly changed in any of the three grades for lifetime use, “past 12-month use, past 30-day use, and daily use from 2019-2020.”
An official with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy’s National Marijuana Initiative, the paper says, claimed that teenage cannabis use was going down in states where cannabis was legalised.
They don’t understand this phenomenon, the officer stated, but a few more studies like this and those against creating a legal cannabis market “for the sake of the children” will be left with any valid arguments whatsoever.
