Teens Are Smoking Less Pot Following Legalization
A federal survey just confirmed that the sanctimonious justification spewed by self-righteous prohibitionists who claim to be protecting young people from the evils of marijuana is willfully deceptive.
The kids don’t need help on this issue. They’re making their own choices.
Adolescent weed-smoking is not now, and hasn’t been, a problem for the past 20 years.
The latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health report confirmed that in 2016, rates of marijuana use among the nation’s 12-to-17-year-olds dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades.
“The percentage of adolescents in 2016 who were current marijuana users was lower than the percentages in most years from 2009 to 2014, but it was similar to the percentage in 2015,” reads the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) report.
According to the NSDUH report, last year, 6.5 percent of adolescents used marijuana on a monthly basis, which represents a statistically significant drop from 2014, when Washington State and Colorado legalized recreational pot and opened weed shops.
The survey notes that the last time monthly teen marijuana use was this low was in 1994.
This trend certainly flies in the face of prohibitionists’ warnings and their dire predictions that legalizing marijuana would send the wrong message to teens and that pot smoking would sky rocket once it was legalized.
Well, it hasn’t.
Young people are much smarter than we give them credit for; they don’t seem to be smoking as many cigarettes or drinking terribly too much booze either.
“Over the past two decades, teen smoking is down over half (55 percent), lifetime drinking is down almost a quarter (23 percent) and binge drinking is down almost half (47 percent),” according to a HIGH TIMES report on this subject last year.
It has also been confirmed by growing public health research that alcohol is not only more toxic to individuals than weed, it is more harmful to society—a fact that the anti-legalization crowd consistently ignores.
So, as over 60 percent of American adults say weed should be legal, according to an August 2017 Quinnipiac poll, the prohibitionists might want to get their facts straight or step aside.
