More teens will smoke marijuana this month than cigarettes

It's not that pot smoking has gone way up, it's that cigarette smoking has gone way down.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Marijuana use among American adolescents has been increasing gradually over the past two years (three years among 12th graders) following years of declining use, according to the latest Monitoring the Future study, which has been tracking drug use among U.S. teens since 1975.

“So far, we have not seen any dramatic rise in marijuana use, but the upward trending of the past two or three years stands in stark contrast to the steady decline that preceded it for nearly a decade,’’ said University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston, the study’s principal investigator.

“Not only is use rising, but a key belief about the degree of risk associated with marijuana use has been in decline among young people even longer, and the degree to which teens disapprove of use of the drug has recently begun to decline. Changes in these beliefs and attitudes are often very influential in driving changes in use.”

As we begin to inch our way toward re-legalization of cannabis for adults, we must be careful to address the legitimate concerns parents have about teenage use of marijuana.  I am not surprised to see beliefs about marijuana risk declining, as we are replacing the reefer madness with honest dialogue about marijuana.  Surely the perception of risk will decline if kids once were told by a D.A.R.E. cop that marijuana would turn them into a sterile amotivated murderous heroin junkie with brains like eggs frying in a pan and now they know marijuana is the least harmful of many drug choices they have before them.  As more states embrace medical use and decriminalization, it’s no surprise teen disapproval of marijuana has declined as well.

One way the prohibitionists have already begun to spin this data is to say “Teens: Pot more popular than cigarettes, alcohol” as TIME Magazine does this week (not true, by the way, as more than twice as many teens drank in the past month as smoked pot, and among 12th graders, one-third more have been drunk in the past month than smoked pot.)  But the story there is not that pot is more popular than cigarettes; it’s that cigarettes’ popularity has dramatically declined compared to pot.

In the graph above you can see the percentage of teenagers who smoked cigarettes monthly from 1991 to 2009 as solid red, orange, and yellow lines.  Monthly teen pot smoking is shown as red, orange, and yellow dotted lines.  Notice how in 1991, cigarettes were far more popular than joints at every age group; there were about as many 8th graders smoking cigarettes as 12th graders smoking pot.  By the late Nineties, more than one in three seniors, one in four sophomores, and one in five eight graders were smoking cigarettes.

From that point on, the marijuana lines fluctuate a little, but stay generally within a 5-percentage-point range over the past dozen years, declining slightly.  But the tobacco use lines plummet by about 15-percentage-points in the same span!  That dramatic improvement in teenage health was achieved through bans on advertising, social pressure on TV/film productions, public service ad campaigns, honest health education, state lawsuits to force responsibility from tobacco industries, and punitive taxation on the product.

Not one adult had to be tased, cuffed, and arrested over cigarettes.  We didn’t have to fumigate large tobacco crops in foreign countries.  We didn’t have to test students and employees for nicotine metabolites in their urine.  We cut in half the teen use of the most addictive drug they have access to without making it illegal for adults.

We can do the same with cannabis.  Teen use of drugs and cannabis in Holland, where an adult can buy cannabis, hash, and mushrooms in a coffeehouse, is half of what it is here in America.  Teen use of drugs and cannabis in Portugal, where adult personal use of all drugs is decriminalized, is less than it is in America.  Teen use of marijuana has declined at a greater rate in the states that have embraced medical marijuana protections.  We recognize that keeping kids off of marijuana doesn’t require locking up the adults who use it responsibly.