According to recent report, the consumption of Marijuana among young adults, especially college students, has been gradually increasing. An article was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday, based on the outcome of the 2002-2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It studied the use of marijuana and smoked tobacco among 18- to 22-year-old in the US. This review analyzed the use of marijuana and tobacco within the past 30 days and the past 12 months. However, the method by which the marijuana was consumed — such as smoking, eating, or vaping.
Even though more young adults are exclusively smoking weed, the number of college students using it is increasing at an alarming speed. Exclusive marijuana use was higher among people in college for both past 30 days and past 12 month.
It also evident that the intake of Marijuana has reduced ever since it was legalized for recreational purpose. “Just to be clear we found no effect on teen use following legalization for medical purposes, but evidence of a possible reduction in use following legalization for recreational purposes,” said Mark Anderson, an associate professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, who was first author of the paper. He said, “Because our study is based on more policy variation than prior work, we view our estimates as the most credible to date in the literature.” “Because many recreational marijuana laws have been passed so recently, we do observe limited post-treatment data for some of these states,” Anderson said. “In a few years, it would make sense to update our estimates as more data become available.”
However, the new study appears to be in contrast with some separate state-level studies that suggest marijuana use among teens remains unchanged and not declining following legalization, said Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, the professor of pediatrics in Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved in the new paper. The researchers wrote in the paper that one possible explanation could be that in states where recreational marijuana is legal, “it is more difficult for teenagers to obtain marijuana as drug dealers are replaced by licensed dispensaries that require proof of age.”
Meanwhile, the overall prevalence of marijuana-only use among youth in the United States since the early 1990s increased from 0.6% in 1991 to 6.3% in 2017, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
“The other question remains, are youth getting the message about the fact that using marijuana during adolescence is more harmful because of their brain development?” Halpern-Felsher said. “Given the legalization, we need more education around marijuana or cannabis use for youth and we don’t really have a lot of education.”
