A favorite argument of the anti-marijuana crowd is that legalization would send the wrong signal to the youth and make them think drugs are good for them. Except that, with increasing legalization across the country, that hasn’t happened yet.
In fact, teen drug use decreased in 2014, according to a study by the University of Michigan and the National Institutes on Drug Abuse. The same year Colorado and Washington’s legalization was in full swing, while two states and the District of Columbia all passed some form of legalization.
Below is a screenshot of an interactive data map by the Washington Post:
Teen use of marijuana, cigarettes, and alcohol were all down. Alcohol and cigarette use are at their lowest point since the university began its survey in 1975. Marijuana use among all three grades studied dropped from 26 to 24 percent.
Daily marijuana use is also in decline, according to data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health released earlier this year.
Some of the highest points for teen marijuana use, in the nineties, mark a time when the “War on Drugs” was campaigning as hard as ever.
More from WaPo:
Also notable: according to the study, marijuana has gotten slightly more difficult for teens to obtain. “Reported availability, on the other hand, is down significantly since 2013 in the two lower grades (and unchanged in 12th grade), which may help to explain the modest decline in use this year.” This backs marijuana advocates’ argument that keeping drugs on the black market actually helps them into the hands of kids. For many teens, marijuana is easier to score than alcohol, thanks to government regulation of the latter.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) (who’s currently on a blacklist in D.C. after trying to sabotage legalization in the city) argued at a recent Heritage event that “Relaxing [marijuana] laws clearly leads to more teenage drug use,” and that it should be “intuitively obvious to everyone that if you legalize marijuana for adults, more children will use marijuana because the message that it’s dangerous will be blunted.” General Barry McCaffrey concurred, suggesting that “You’ve got to have a screw loose” to want kids smoking pot thanks to drug legalization.
