A new study has found that students are less likely to drink heavily in U.S. states that have legalized cannabis compared to states that have not.
“The biggest takeaway from our paper is that problem binge drinking in college students who are 21 and over, changes after the implementation of recreational marijuana use,” noted Zoe Alley, one of the study’s authors. Alley is a Ph.D student at Oregon State University.
Binge drinking was defined by the researchers as having consumed five or more drinks at one time in the past two weeks.
States that had legalized cannabis had six per cent decreased odds of binge drinking among students 21 and over.
“Once you turn 21 in states without marijuana legalization, alcohol suddenly becomes very easy to come by, relatively speaking, so people might switch to that,” said Oregon State psychology professor David Kerr.
“When you reach the legal drinking age, suddenly a lot of people transition to using more alcohol because now it’s more available and marijuana is not,” Alley remarked.
“When you change that, so that marijuana is legal, we might see less of a substitution.”
“In Oregon, there are lots of (cannabis) retail shops, and it’s advertised,” Kerr says.
“We see it on billboards. The shops are very obvious in the way they are painted and displayed. It seems very available.”
