Survey Finds Teen Pot Smoking Fell This Year Despite the Message Supposedly Sent by Legalization

A few months ago, I
noted that the National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed no
increase in marijuana use by teenagers after 2012, despite
groundbreaking legalization measures approved by voters in Colorado
and Washington that year. According to the latest
results from the Monitoring the Future Study,
released today, marijuana use by eighth-graders, 10th-graders,
and 12th-graders fell this year, even as state-licensed pot shops
opened in both of those states. It is too early to say whether
diversion from adult buyers will increase cannabis consumption
among teenagers in Colorado and Washington. But contrary to
warnings from prohibitionists, legalization does not seem to be
sending a message that encourages teenagers across the country to
smoke pot.

“There has been more public dialogue about marijuana over the
past year than any 12-month period in history,” says Mason Tvert,
communications director at the Marijuana Policy Project. “States
around the country are making marijuana legal for adults,
establishing medical marijuana programs, and decriminalizing
marijuana possession, and the sky is not falling. The debate is not
resulting in more marijuana use among young people, but it is
resulting in more sensible marijuana laws.”

That point is reinforced when you take a longer view. Since
1996, when California became the first state to allow medical use
of marijuana, cannabis consumption has fallen in all three of these
age groups, even as 22 states and the District of Columbia have
followed California’s example. Those trends are the opposite of
what drug warriors said would happen.

“How can we expect our children to reject drugs when some
authorities are telling them that illegal drugs should no
longer remain illegal, but should be used instead to help the
sick?” Thomas Constantine, then head of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, asked
just before the California vote in 1996. “We cannot afford to send
ambivalent messages about drugs.”

John Walters, George W. Bush’s drug czar, likewise
cited the purported threat to teenagers when he urged voters to
reject medical marijuana initiatives. Gil Kerlikowske, President
Obama’s first drug czar, took up the same theme. “We have been
telling young people, particularly for the past couple years, that
marijuana is medicine,” he complained
in 2010. “So it shouldn’t be a great surprise to us that young
people are now misperceiving the dangers or the risks around
marijuana.”

From Kerlikowske’s perspective, this worrisome misperception was
reflected in the rising percentage of teenagers who rejected
the idea that people who smoke pot run a “great risk” of harming
themselves. Since people who smoke pot do not, in fact, run a great
risk of harming themselves, it is hard to share Kerlikowske’s
alarm. In any event, notes Lloyd Johnston, the researcher who
oversees the Monitoring the Future Study, “the belief that regular
marijuana use harms the user…continues to fall among youth, so
changes in this belief do not seem to explain the change in use
this year.” Neither does “personal
disapproval of use,” which “is also down some in 8th and 12th
grades.”