Schools

When It's 4:20, Teens Prefer Real – Not Synthetic – Marijuana, Michigan Study Shows

Referring to pot as a "benign substance that has no ill effects" in medical marijuana and legalization campaigns is "a great disservice to young people," drug czar says.

There’s some good and bad news in a recent study by University of Michigan researchers about what America’s teens prefer to smoke at 4:20 – which, if you haven’t been paying attention to urban lingo, is the universal time to get high.

The good news: They’re increasingly suspicious about synthetic marijuana, such as K2 and Spice, substances the Drug Enforcement Agency waged war on with a nationwide sting last summer.

“These designer drugs are destructive, dangerous, and are destroying lives,” the DEA said of the synthetics, which it claims causes vomiting, anxiety, agitation, irritability, seizures hallucinations, tachycardia, elevated blood pressure, loss of consciousness, organ damage and death.

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The bad news?

Increasingly, teenagers are smoking the real thing after getting the “wrong message” from medical marijuana and legalization campaigns, the Detroit Free Press reports, quoting Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

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“If it’s continued to be talked about as a benign substance that has no ill effects, we’re doing a great disservice to young people by giving them that message,” Kerlikowske, said.

The dangers of marijuana use, particularly at a young age, is that experimentation can lead to regular use and teens are “setting themselves up for declines in IQ and diminished ability for success in life,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has commissioned the Monitoring the Future survey with the University of Michigan since 1975 .

Annually, 40,000 high school seniors, 10th graders and eighth graders across the country are surveyed. The younger students were added in 1991.

Lead researcher Lloyd Johnston said that when teens perceive marijuana is safe, their use of it increases. That’s what’s been happening since 2008 after a decade of decline. 

In the recent survey, released Wednesday, 40 percent of high school seniors said they see smoking marijuana as risky, a 4 percent decline from 2012. Two decades ago, 75 percent of high school seniors said smoking pot was risky.

Some specific findings of the survey:

  • The number of seniors who said they’ve used synthetics dropped from 11 percent in 2012 to 8 percent in 2011. A growing number of teens said they saw the drugs as dangerous.
  • However, one in 15 seniors reported using marijuana daily, up from one in 50 in 1993, as fewer see the drug as dangerous.

DISCUSS: Should marijuana be legalized? if so, should it be regulated, as alcohol is? Go to the comments and tell us what you think about these and other questions as Americans’ views on marijuana use seem to be changing.

>>> For more specific survey results, go to the Monitoring the Future web site.


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