Is drug use inevitable among teens and young adults? Listen to Dr. Robert DuPont’s discussion on High Truths on Drugs and Addiction, Episode # 13. Dr. DuPont gets right to the data in challenging the myth that “everyone uses.”
Dr. Roneet Lev of High Truths Podcast
The peer-reviewed journal JAMA Network Open asked Robert L. DuPont, MD and Caroline DuPont, MD, President and Vice President, respectively, of IBH, to respond to a new research study by Bertha K. Madras, et al., "Associations of parental marijuana use with offspring marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol use and opioid misuse."
In their commentary, Drs. DuPont note that this study showed that when parents used marijuana, their children had increased risk of using marijuana too. "This underscores the need for engagement by both parents and health care professionals in youth substance use prevention and parental substance use disorder treatment." Drs. DuPont then connect the findings to IBH's own youth prevention work:
The association of parent use of marijuana with offspring use of marijuana and tobacco complements a recent finding suggesting that there is a common liability for substance use among adolescents. Among young people aged 12 to 17 years, the use of one substance is positively associated with the use of others, and nonuse of any one substance is positively associated with non-use of others. There is also evidence that there is a large and steadily increasing number of American youth who do not use any substances, including alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana. More than half (52%) of high school seniors have not used any substance in the past month and more than one-quarter (26%) have not used any substance in their lifetime, up from lows in 1982 of 16% and 3%, respectively. Together, these facts can empower parents when they are educated about their own substance use choices affecting the risks of their children using substances. They can also inform health care professionals that no use of alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, or other drugs is not only the health standard for youth but that nonuse by young patients is common and achievable.
This commentary extends the work of IBH to set a new health standard for youth prevention of One Choice: no use of any alcohol, nicotine, marijuana or other drugs by youth under age 21.
A powerful new “Statement of Concern” was published recently by a cohort of Massachusetts doctors, clinicians, and scientists. They strongly reject their state’s treatment of marijuana as an “ordinary commodity” that requires little or no consideration of its impact on the health of the citizens of Massachusetts, and call for it instead to be “Regulate[d] and govern[ed]… using a Public Health Framework…[that] prioritizes population-level health over commercial market interests…”
They observe that while not all marijuana users will experience negative effects, “the risk is substantial enough to require policies which discourage use.”
Among the key points of the Statement are:
that just like the previous “regulatory failure[s]” of the state regarding tobacco, opiods, and vaping, such regulatory failure is likely in the case of marijuana as well if the state does not prioritize public health
Marijuana is a potentially addictive drug, and its potency is ever-increasing, thereby increasing the risks of harm
“the tobacco industry has spent billions of dollars” to enter the vaping and marijuana markets, and they are likely to combine the two interests to produce high-THC vapes, which are of particular and growing risk to youth.
“Marijuana use by adolescents can impair brain development…reduce academic success, impact long-term career growth, and even lower user IQ. (These two points are a particular focus of IBH through its One Choice teen drug use prevention initiative.)
Massachusetts doctors and clinicians are seeing these effects first-hand in their own patients.
IBH encourages everyone who cares about public health to read this Statement of Concern, and to actively seek to implement its conclusions in their own states as well as at the federal level.
Click here to read the Statement of Concern via marijauna-policy.org
Click here to visit the Marijuana Policy Initiative’s web page about the Statement.
Alex Berenson recently discussed his new book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence at a presentation co-sponsored by IBH and Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) at The Heritage Foundation.
New data from the nationally representative Monitoring the Future survey show marijuana use among college students has reached the highest levels in three decades. Notable, in 2017 4.4% of college students reported daily or near-daily marijuana use in the past month while 13.7% of same-age non-college students were daily users, a number that has doubled since 2006. Principal investigator John Schulenberg noted, “The brain is still growing in the early 20s, and the scientific evidence indicates that heavy marijuana use can be detrimental to cognitive functioning and mental health… Getting a foothold on the roles and responsibilities of adulthood may be all the more difficult for these one-in-eight noncollege youth who use marijuana on a daily or near daily basis. As for college students, we know from our research and that of others that heavy marijuana use is associated with poor academic performance and dropping out of college.” Read more.
