Medical Marijuana Laws Don't Encourage Teen Use, Claims Study

Researchers looked at marijuana usage have found that laws legalizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes have not had an impact on teen use.

According to a new report released via The Lancet Psychiatry, Columbia University researchers looked at marijuana use of over a million teenagers in grades 8 10 and 12 from 48 states. With over 24 years worth of data spanning from 1991 to 2014, they found no discernible indication that legalizing marijuana for medical purposes leads to an increase in teen use. 

"Our findings provide the strongest evidence to date that marijuana use by teenagers does not increase after a state legalises medical marijuana. Rather, up to now, in the states that passed medical marijuana laws, adolescent marijuana use was already higher than in other states. Because early adolescent use of marijuana can lead to many long-term harmful outcomes, identifying the factors that actually play a role in adolescent use should be a high research priority," quoted Science Daily of study author Dr Deborah Hasin, Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center, New York.

The researchers report that drug use rates are typically higher in states which have legalized marijuana, noted Fox News. Overall, teen marijuana use was more common in states which have passed medical marijuana as of 2014. 16 percent of teens from states with legalized medical marijuana have admitted to using marijuana within the last month while for those states that have not legalized, it stood at 13 percent.

When the scientists narrowed down the lens, they found that within the 21 states where medical marijuana has been legalized, there has been no change in the statistics of teen use. Compared to the 16 percent of teens who reported using marijuana in the last month before the law was passed, 15 percent of teens said the same after the law was passed. 

"State-level risk factors other than medical marijuana laws could contribute to both marijuana use and the passage of medical marijuana laws, and such factors warrant investigation," concluded the scientists (via Time). 

However, the researchers did emphasize that their study focused strictly on medical marijuana laws and did not look into recreation use laws and its effects on teen use. This study particularly looked into whether marijuana use was higher in states which have passed laws regarding medical use and whether the incidence of use changed after the passage of medical marijuana laws. 

The abstract of the new study can be found here.