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| A
group of protestors rally in front of the White House on April 2, 2016 calling
for the government to support the legalization of marijuana. Photo: Rena Schild | Shutterstock. |
Recreational marijuana use is
only legal in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska, but the idea is gaining
traction in other states as well, some of which already have legalized the drug
for medical use.
There are of course many people
who don’t want to see legal marijuana use expanded, and many of them argue that
legalizing recreational weed would lead to more adolescents using the drug.
So far though, they’ve been
wrong, and a recent study in Colorado of 17,000 middle and high school students
has found that only 21% of teens used marijuana in 2015, which was down from
25% in 2009. Recreational use was legalized in that state in 2012, but has not
lead to increased use among teenagers.
Part of that may be that teens
are simply using weed less than in the past, but many teens polled claimed that
weed has been easy to get for years, and that making it legal for adults hasn’t
changed that in any meaningful ways.
It seems that teens that want
to smoke weed have always had the opportunity to do so, with or without the
drug being legalized for any use, recreational or otherwise.
There have been claims by
certain anti-legalization groups that Colorado actually has the highest rates
of teen marijuana use in the country, but these are based on federal statistics
that only poll 400 kids in each state.
That data is inherently flawed
when compared to the new survey, considering the state has close to 5.4 million
residents. This recent data actually establishes the Colorado rate as below the
national average.
The argument that legalizing
weed would lead to more teens using it seems to have no support from the facts,
though whether or not that actually works against groups that use this argument
remains to be seen.
It is, after all, an argument
based on fear, and such arguments are almost always unfounded, but that doesn’t
stop people from believing them.
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