Legal marijuana means that children and teenagers will start massively abusing the substance—that has been the rallying cry of opponents of legalization for decades now. According to a Gallup survey, 83% of opponents to legalization believe that to be a fact. But a study of “cannabis use disorders” in Colorado and Washington, which was led by researchers from Temple University published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, shows that the opposite is true.
After recreational marijuana was legalized, “the rate of adolescent treatment admissions for marijuana use declined significantly, with the mean rate falling nearly in half” between 2008 and 2017, the study concluded. “The decline in admissions rate was greater in Colorado and Washington compared to [states where recreational marijuana is not legal].” This is particularly significant as marijuana is the drug of choice of more than 70% of minors admitted for treatment in Colorado.
This study is another brick added to the ever-growing body of scientific evidence showing that marijuana legalization does not have the nefarious effects that opponents of the measure claim it has. As more than half of the states either fully or partially legalized weed, we are starting to be able to actually look at factual evidence instead of the “what ifs” and catastrophe scenarios depicted before Americans were able to legally purchase marijuana.
“While we are encouraged that rates of new treatment admissions for marijuana use among adolescents exhibited a general decline in the states we examined, it is unclear whether this finding reflects trends in the prevalence of CUD (cannabis use disorder) or, rather, changes in treatment seeking behaviors due to changing perceptions of risk and public attitudes towards marijuana use,” the authors of the study noted.
The worst-case scenario, the study says, is that the need for treatment still exists but isn’t being met for some reason despite youth use stagnating or even increasing; “it may be the case that admissions rates are falling because an increasing proportion of adolescents with CUD are not entering treatment.”
Is Youth Use Declining Too?
Beyond this new study, a large amount of research has been led by private and public entities on the question.
The Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, for instance, researched the topic to determine whether the state’s experience of legalization was a positive one. “Surveys show Colorado is not experiencing an increase in youth usage of marijuana,” the report says. “The youth marijuana rate reported for the 2015-2016 school year (9.1%) was the lowest it’s been since 2007-2008, [and] the proportion of students trying marijuana before age 13 went down from 9.2% in 2015 to 6.5% in 2017.”
The report adds that the number of juvenile marijuana arrests decreased 16%, from 3,168 in 2012 to 2,655 in 2017. The school expulsion rate for drug-related reasons fell from 91 per 100,000 students in 2008-2009 to 38 in 2017-2018. In 2005, Colorado’s youth used marijuana at a higher rate than the rest of the country, but that rate diminished in Colorado faster than it did nationwide; in 2017, minors in Colorado used marijuana at almost precisely the same rate as the national average, including states where the substance is fully illegal.
In Washington state, similar results have been found, although not through research quite as thorough as what Colorado did. “Despite legalization of the retail sale of marijuana to adults in Washington in 2012, evidence from the biennial Washington State Healthy Youth Survey indicates that the prevalence of past 30–day marijuana use among students in grades 10 and 12 began to decline that year,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published in October 2019, basing their findings on a survey led by the Washington government. “The decline continued in 2016 among grade 10 students and did not change significantly among grade 12 students. This decline or absence of change in youth marijuana use after legalization of retail sales to adults is consistent with trends reported in Colorado,” the CDC continues.
An important finding in Washington is that school students believe that obtaining marijuana became harder after it was made legal. Less than 10% of grade 12 students in Washington considered it “very hard” to get marijuana in 1992. After the state legalized medical marijuana in 1998, that proportion quickly grew, and 20% of grade 12 students considered it very hard to get marijuana in 2006. Among grade eight students, 40% thought it was “very hard” to get marijuana in 1992, 65% thought so in 2016, up from 60% in 2012, when recreational marijuana was also legalized.
Nationwide, as more and more states are choosing to legalize marijuana, the increase in youth usage of marijuana that was prophesied by opponents of cannabis reform never came.
“Youth marijuana use can have adverse health outcomes. However, reports from Colorado, Oregon, and Washington indicate no statewide increase in youth marijuana use following retail legalization for adults,” the CDC said. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), in its annual report, noted that 12.5% of adolescents aged 12 to 17 were marijuana users in 2018, down from 15.8% in 2002. Youth use, nationwide, has been in a constant decline since 2012, diminishing by almost 8% since Washington and Colorado first legalized recreational marijuana.
To circle back to Temple University’s study, two potential explanations have been suggested by researchers: that youth use of marijuana declined and/or that societal attitudes towards weed shifted in favor of more acceptance. As evidenced by a large amount of data from Colorado, Washington and the entire nation, legal marijuana leads to lower youth use—because it loses its appeal as a taboo, because legal shops won’t sell to minors, unlike drug dealers, and because the population can better understand and react to problematic patterns of cannabis consumption. But, in addition to that, it seems likely that society is in fact slowly adopting a more open-minded stance when it comes to marijuana and not sending teenagers to drug rehab for small-time marijuana use. The most dangerous thing about marijuana is that it is illegal, and this snapshot of nearly a decade of legal weed in Colorado and Washington is that of two states that were appeased thanks to cannabis reform.
