High School Students' Marijuana Usage Hits 30 Year Peak, Says Study
High school students’ marijuana usage is at its highest level for 30 years, with one in 15 U.S. kids using the drug, according to an annual government report.
The National Institutes of Health conducts a yearly survey of over 46,000 students, and this year they found that about 25 percent of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders who participated in the study had tried pot within the past year. Clearly, the trend of drug use in high schools is increasing, as this figure was higher than the 21 percent of kids who did drugs in 2007.
The years-old study, called Monitoring the Future, also found that the trend of regularly using marijuana only got worse as kids matured. While only 16 percent of 8th graders smoked regularly, nearly 40 percent of seniors spent their time doing the drug.
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Dr. Christian Thurstone of the Denver Health and Hospital Authority was not involved in the study, but he claimed that the increase in medical marijuana usage was a major contributing factor to children’s drug use.
"We're clearly seeing an increase in teenage marijuana use that corresponds pretty clearly in time with the increase in medical marijuana use," said Thurstone to The New York Times. The idea of marijuana as medicine could make it seem less harmful to a younger generation.
It is certainly a contradiction to warn kids about the dangers of marijuana when some of the same children’s parents or grandparents use the drug to treat glaucoma, chronic pain, and headaches.
Richard Gil Kerlikowske, the Director of the Officer of National Drug Control Policy, pointed to the time he’s personally spent with high school students, and the dangerous perception legal marijuana use can give them.
“When I've done focus groups with high school students in states where medical marijuana is legal, they say, 'Well, if it’s called medicine and it's given to patients by caregivers, then that's really the wrong message for us as high school students,'" he told The Times.
Currently, medical marijuana use is legal in 16 states.
Fortunately, marijuana usage has been the only drug that high schoolers have started using more often. Barbituates, sedatives, cocaine, heroin, and even alcohol have all gradually declined over the past 30 years, possibly because grade school students realize the dangers behind them.
