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 “We have been expecting marijuana use to increase among young
adults,” lead author Richard Miech told Reuters Health in an email.
Young adults today as compared to those of the past are less likely
to hold the belief that occasional marijuana use will negatively
affect their health, said Miech, a researcher at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“We've seen again and again that when this belief trends down then
marijuana use increases (e.g. in the early 1990s), and, conversely,
that when this belief trends up then marijuana use declines (e.g. in
the mid-1980s),” he told Reuters Health by email.
Miech and his colleagues think the recent string of U.S. states
having legalized recreational use of marijuana accounts in part for
the declining proportion of young adults who believe that occasional
marijuana use is harmful to health.
“It is likely that at least some young adults interpret this wave of
legalization as a signal that marijuana use is safe and
state-sanctioned,” he said.
To see how that is affecting recreational use among young people,
the study team analyzed data from annual surveys of more than 50,000
adults and adolescents. The surveys have been ongoing since 1975,
and are funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Miech said.
They focused on participants who were 19 to 22 years old between
1977 and 2015 and had never used marijuana before their senior year
in high school. That was around 64 percent of participants.
About 9 percent of 19-year-olds and 15 percent of 22-year-olds not
in college started using marijuana after high school and those
percentages remained stable through the entire study period, the
researchers report in American Journal of Public Health.
Among college students, the proportion that started using marijuana
ranged from 13 percent to 17 percent between 1977 and 2012, then
those numbers crept up to between 18 percent and 21 percent from
2013 to 2015.
“We found that marijuana initiation did increase among young adults
age 19-22 since 2013, but only among those in college. There was no
change in levels of marijuana initiation among 19-22 year-olds who
were not in college,” Miech said.
The college environment appears to promote substance use, perhaps in
part because of the lack of parental supervision, lots of free time
and a party culture, Miech said.
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“For what it's worth, higher levels of substance use in college is
also seen with binge drinking (5+ drinks in one sitting): youth age
19-22 are much more likely to binge drink if they are in college as
compared to their age peers who are not in college,” Miech said.
Parents should know the majority of young adults who attend college
do not initiate marijuana use, Miech added, but the number is
increasing.
“There are many reasons why college students might try or use
marijuana,” said Christine Lee, director of the Center for the Study
of Health and Risk Behaviors at the University of Washington in
Seattle, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“We surveyed incoming first-year college students on why they tried
or use marijuana . . . . For some, experimentation was a motivator.
Young adults might just want to try it and see what it is about. For
others, they might use marijuana for reasons such as for social
bonding, relaxation, boredom, to fit in, or to enjoy the feeling,”
Lee said by email.
It would be helpful to begin to identify whether there are high-risk
periods for marijuana initiation such as the first six weeks of
college, as the study authors suggest, or specific events such as
21st birthdays, particularly for students living in states where
recreational marijuana use is legal for those 21 and over.
“If we can identify certain risk periods, it would be easier for
colleges to target resources and prevention activities to those
times,” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2ox3zmk American Journal of Public Health,
online April 20, 2017.
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