New research out of the University of Washington has found that the legalization of marijuana for Washington state adults may be impacting a steady downward trend in teen marijuana use.
In a study of over 230 teens and young adults, researchers found that teens may be more likely to use marijuana following legalization than they otherwise would have been.
In the study, researchers examined whether marijuana legalization led to teen use of the drug, as well as teens’ perceptions that the drug is harmful.
Controlling for age, sex, race and parent education of the participants, results revealed that kids who entered their teens more recently were less likely to report they’d used marijuana in the past year.
“When we think about marijuana legalization, a worry is that underage use may go up,” said Jennifer Bailey, the study’s lead author. Bailey is also the principal investigator with the Social Development Research Group in the UW School of Social Work. “Early use and heavy use during adolescence can have a lot of negative health consequences, then and later in life, so we don’t want teen use to be going up.”
According to Baily, before marijuana legalization, rates of teen marijuana use and other drug use had both been decreasing over the last couple of decades.
Bailey said, “Data like ours let you look at individuals and how drug use and behavior change over time, and then we can relate that to changes in policy.”
The UW findings can help inform prevention messages targeting teens and marijuana, Bailey added.
“A teen usage rate that holds steady isn’t good enough if it would normally be going down. We need to devote more attention to prevention of adolescent use in the context of legalization because we want to keep the decreases we’ve been seeing before legalization was implemented,” Bailey said.
The study was published earlier this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
