15 ms·

Dramatic drop in marijuana use among U.S. youth over a decade

115 points by geox 2y ago

skyyler 2y ago
>“In the U.S. the current landscape of marijuana legalization in adults adds a complex layer to the issues of adolescent marijuana use. As more states continue to legalize recreational marijuana, the accessibility and perceived normalcy of the drug may increase, particularly for adolescents who may view its legal status as an indication of safety or acceptability,” said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D. Interesting to read this in an article about how marijuana use has gone down in the time since legalization efforts have started to see success. It almost seems comically out of touch.
- anovikov 2y ago
  So you think that the research is wrong? I see it as very plausible. Kids like to break rules and long for forbidden fruits. When weed is no longer forbidden, they have no interest in it just as they see little interest in getting drunk.
  - theboogieman 2y ago
    Add the fact that, if legal marijuana is priced low enough to make black market dealers less common, the people selling the marijuana will now be forced to only sell to people 21+. I’m not saying that this is the case as legal recreational marijuana sale prices in many legal states are high enough (due to taxes or artificial supply dampening due to restricting who can grow it and how much) to justify the existence of a black market, but if that was the case, I’d expect a drop off in youth usage.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      I think this overstates the interest in drugs among Zillenials and Gen Z. Most people in our cohort tend to follow a "you do you" philosophy that cuts both ways - if you choose to or choose not to partake in marijuana or alcohol, that's your choice. Stuff like "marijuana" or "alcohol" isn't viewed as cool or uncool, it's just viewed as a yet another consumable like coffee or sugar. Same way some people choose to cut down on coffee and others are coffee fiends, it's similar with booze and weed. Personally, I find that older generations have an unhealthily polarized view on weed and alcohol consumption - they are split between the "weed cures everything" and "weed is the devil's lettuce" camps. Heck, even this thread has tinges of judgement about how younger generations just don't care one way or the other about weed as if weed consumption is a core part of being young.
      - graypegg 2y ago
        I guess I'm a zillenial, born 1998. I distinctly remember a time in highschool where I saw vaping (the flavoured cartridge kind) shift from cool, to just some meaningless detail about someone. I totally think this shift has stuck. You're 100% right in comparing weed in this context to coffee, that exact same pattern happened to vaping too. It's not like there WASN'T drinking, vaping, and weed. Just no one is pushing it on you. The pushing is a lot more focused on social (and online) things now. But that's a different topic. I'm on board for it being a good thing. The kids are alright eh?
        alephnerd 2y ago
        > It's not like there WASN'T drinking, vaping, and weed. Just no one is pushing it on you. The pushing is a lot more focused on social (and online) things now. But that's a different topic. Exactly! > I'm on board for it being a good thing. The kids are alright eh? That's my opinion as well, but I'm part of the Zillenial cohort as well so I'm biased.
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      >if legal marijuana is priced low enough to make black market dealers less common, It never is. The overhead from running a lawful business is way higher even before you start accounting for all the weed specific cost of compliance stuff.
      - standardUser 2y ago
        It varies from state to state, but legal prices are comparable to black market prices in a lot of places. And the selection available in legal markets is beyond compare.
      - mezzie2 2y ago
        Oh, it can be. I live in MI and weed is really, really cheap here. I don't smoke, but I partake in edibles (I have MS and nerve pain that meds can't do much about). I can get 2000mg of edibles for 40 bucks. And that's without price comparing: That's just going to the closest dispensary near my house. And lots of places do penny/free joints with a very low/no minimum purchase.
      - marssaxman 2y ago
        That's not the case here in Washington state: legal weed is significantly cheaper than the black-market ever was, unless you want some high-end specialty bud you most likely couldn't have gotten at all back then.
      - kredd 2y ago
        We've had legal marijuana since 2018 up here in Canada, and from the statistics it looks like the market has almost caught up. The closest comparison I can think of is piracy and beginning of streaming wars (like Spotify and Netflix). Sure piracy is free, but a significant chunk of people started subbing for the services because of the convenience. If you'll only save about $5 per purchase, but have to get cash, arrange everything and etc., that might be just enough friction for you to just go to one of the billion stores nearby.
      - inglor_cz 2y ago
        A conspicuous absence of black market for other herbal products such as tea and cilantro indicates that the edge of the black market over the lawful businesses isn't that great, if extant at all.
  - skyyler 2y ago
    >So you think that the research is wrong? I think a poorly designed study can confirm pre-existing biases instead of actually test for anything. Stating that "research suggests" something doesn't actually mean much to me anymore. I'd love to know what research suggests that “marijuana legalization in adults can influence adolescent behavior through their perceptions of less risk as well as increased availability, both of which may impede efforts to reduce adolescent use.” The numbers this article is reporting seem to suggest the opposite.
    - StackRanker3000 2y ago
      I think the other person just mistook your point and thought that you were implying that marijuana use _hasn’t_ actually gone down.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I suspect the research is reasonably accurate, but you will always have someone voicing the position of safyism, caution, and whataboutism.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    I think there's a bit more at play. Let's contrast with buying hard drugs like meth. If you want to buy meth, you have to figure out how to get in contact with the sorts of people who'll be holding it. That means hanging out where they hang out and blending in to the point they trust you. By the time you've done all that, you've got some sunk costs invested in making connections with drug dealers. You're kind of bought into the whole ecosystem. In places where weed is legal, you can go into a store, buy some, try it, and if you decide it's not for you, just don't do it again. I don't use weed, but yesterday I walked into a liquor store to buy a stout beer I like. I didn't have to hang out and party with the clerk to get her to trust me enough to sell me my beer. I gave her some money, she handed me a shopping bag, and that's the end of it. That's what it's like buying weed from a dispensary now. TL;DR if you don't have to hang out with drug dealers to buy drugs, you might be less inclined to buy more stuff from drug dealers.
    - dfxm12 2y ago
      To add, dealers aren't referred to as "pushers" for no reason, either.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        Good point. No one at a beer store has ever tried to talk me into buying more than I wanted, except maybe boredly pointing to some display and saying "we have X on sale if you want some."
    - throwup238 2y ago
      > By the time you've done all that, you've got some sunk costs invested in making connections with drug dealers. You're kind of bought into the whole ecosystem. Shortcut: go the biggest hospital near you and find the fast food joint nearest the ER entrance. The drug users discharged after OD treatment will gather there and the dealers find then.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        You know, that's the kind of thing that seems perfectly obvious once you've pointed it out, but it wouldn't have occurred to me.
  - pizza234 2y ago
    > When weed is no longer forbidden, they have no interest in it just as they see little interest in getting drunk. I believe drugs (incl. alcohool) are a considerably more complex habits. Getting intoxicated have socially desirable outcomes (if one ignores the downsides), unrelated to unavailability. Some drugs like weed can also be part of rituals (e.g. "meeting and getting stoned").
  - dec0dedab0de 2y ago
    I think it’s because there are less illegal weed dealers. Which means there are less people willing to sell to kids. Basically making it legal has made it harder for kids to get.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Vapes are edge and easy enough to get. Weed is popular among millennials, which are now the “cringe” generation so there’s that as well. Weed just isn’t as cool as it was before.
      - throaway89 2y ago
        Yup. Hasn't been cool in Canada since legalization, but a lot of milennials still cling to it
        dingnuts 2y ago
        weird implication that millennials only did it originally out of a desire to be cool, and are still doing it "to be cool" some people just like it more than alcohol, wtf
        dartos 2y ago
        I like it more than alcohol, but as a teenager it was definitely just to be cool.
    - tmn 2y ago
      It is not hard at all to find a 21 year old to buy some legally and pass it on for a small tip.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tmn 2y ago
    Weed and alcohol remain forbidden due to age restrictions. But anecdotally, I grew up in the 90's and 00's. When weed was outright illegal and alcohol was as it currently is. There was plenty of desire to get drunk among minors. Weed had some but very little presence in my area. Today the weed presence is much more on par with alcohol among highschoolers (or so I'm told) where I'm from.
  - smeej 2y ago
    My parents actually used this as a strategy when my sister and I were teens 20+ years ago. They casually offered that, as children of the '70s, there really weren't any drugs they hadn't tried, so if I was interested in any, I could just let them know and they'd get them and we could do them together. Made it seem as uncool as humanly possible, so I never tried. By the time our youngest brother was a teen, they'd gotten overconfident in their success and never made the offer to him. He eventually quit using, but it took 12 steps and a lot of time and effort my sister and I were spared!
    - m463 2y ago
      lol, same thing happened to a friend with cigarettes when they were a kid. Slightly different though - parents offered a cigarette during the time when they would say "Bleeeeech! this is horrible!" I think it headed off the time later when they wouldn't be able to react in front of their peers.
  - rozap 2y ago
    Or it's legitimately harder to get. In high school we used to smoke weed because it was easy to get (friendly local neighborhood dealer didn't check ID) and very rarely drank alcohol because it was tricky to find.
  - m463 2y ago
    I kind of think teenagers aren't into all the different boutique wines, and legal marijuana is sort of giving off the same "older people" vibe.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  This is not a new trend: https://usafacts.org/articles/is-teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-declining/ https://usafacts.org/articles/is-teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-d... Alcohol and other drug use, teen pregnancy, and sex in general have been declining in teens in the West for more than a decade.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - standardUser 2y ago
      > I'd rather deal with a teen pregnancy epidemic than the current situation of rising authoritarianism, isolationism, and reactionary turn that we are seeing from the youth of today. You mean the male youth of today.
      - NemoNobody 2y ago
        Ok, I understand your point but let's be real for a minute and just acknowledge that the worse situation that you can get. I'd rather hear about how what is happening with young men today was happening with young women than men - not that that would be better but it would be less dangerous. Young men that are disenfranchised from their society and have little to live for are a primary metric political scientists use to measure the stability of country. Historically speaking, once a society gets too many men like that, the society ends. This isn't a battle of the sexes and women do not win bc of what has happened with men.
        standardUser 2y ago
        Historically speaking, we have never seen a society where women have more education, wealth and status than men. This is uncharted territory. Not that I don't fear the repercussions of having the bottom 50% of men desperate and disenfranchised. But those bottom 50% of men don't guarantee societal collapse because they're not then ones propping it up, women are. The question might be, what will women and higher status men do about the problems caused by the bottom half men?
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I wonder how much of this is attributable to legalization or other factors. Teen Alcohol use has gone down ~50% over the last 30 years, and but there has been no legalization effort there. Similarly, teen sex rate has also gone down ~50% over the same time period. Overall, abstention from behaviors seems to be a major trend. I would be curious to know if this is due to a cultural aversion to perceived risky behaviors, lack of autonomy, or some other factor like rate of behavior modification medicine.
- ToDougie 2y ago
  Some ideas: Parents are being cautious with their (statistically fewer) children. Prevalence of CCTV and panopticon theory making risky behavior seem impossible. Disappearance of third spaces. Crazy homeless druggies everywhere. Consequences of abuse are far more obvious.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Proliferation of scheduled stuff beyond the school day leaving less free time to engage in activities that can't be done on a screen. I think your comment about homeless is too specific to certain regions.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Or, the "always there" nature of screen activities makes it very easy to never do anything else. When I was a kid we had no mobile phones, nor did we have computers or internet. if you wanted to talk with your friends you had to go meet up with them in person. So hanging out at the mall or at a park or an arcade was pretty common. So were after-school activities, sports, band, clubs, etc. A lot of this stuff, being away from home, was marginally or totally unsupervised, so there was a lot more opportunity to try "illegal" things.
- tayo42 2y ago
  I think I've seen the sex thing attributed to the "loneliness epidemic" and internet use that comes up alot. If that is true, makes sense for the same cause to apply to smoking and drinking. Drinking beers by yourself as a teen is weird, you generally at least start that stuff with friends.
hx8 2y ago
How accurate can youth self reported drug usage statistics actually be? It seems like the type of thing that would sway heavily based on if the kids were in a serious mood or a playful mood, who was giving the survey, etc.
- moomin 2y ago
  The good news is it doesn’t really matter. The absolute numbers might be inaccurate, but the skew is likely to stay the same over decades. So it probably is dropping.
  - elliottkember 2y ago
    > the skew is likely to stay the same over decades This is a huge assumption.
    - hx8 2y ago
      Yeah, I don't agree with that at all. A simple change such as "More schools are giving the survey right before standardized tests instead of at the end of the school day" may skew numbers over years. Edit: There's probably dozens of variables with how the survey is given that will skew the bias. They probably don't even ask the exact same question in the exact same way on the physical survey.
      - mikem170 2y ago
        > A simple change ... may skew numbers over years Is this your guess, or is there other conflicting data?
        elliottkember 2y ago
        The point is that we don’t know, and this means the data may be wrong. For an experiment to prove something, you need to control for these variables.
rgbrgb 2y ago
worried about the youth if this is true. are we alienating them from a relatively safe form of mischief and mind expansion by making it legal and socially accepted? hoping that perhaps it's reporting error as kids get smart about surveillance etc. hoping for the kids.
- jackcosgrove 2y ago
  Kids these days!
chis 2y ago
Teens are basically doing less of everything because of the phones. Alcohol, sex, getting a drivers license, going to movies, basically any activity you could name has declined rapidly starting around 2012 when phones became ubiquitous.
- throw09230923 2y ago
  Maybe they are just more informed with phones. Memes about permanently stoned people are spreading fast. Propaganda about "cool" hippies does not work any more. The same with myths around sex, real anti-conception effectiveness...
- Spivak 2y ago
  Except no one has been able to establish any kind of causation. The observation is real but the explanation is dubious. If you consider sex, drugs, and alcohol to be forms of "stuff to do" then it sorta sounds plausible but why driver's licenses? Why not sports or extracurriculars? Why not video games? Why are tabletop rpg getting more popular? You could just as easily blame ubiquitous access to porn for most of this as well and it would be just as plausible.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    TikTok brain rot. Streamers. Influencers. Teens are living their lives vicariously through other people. Capitalism has finally created the perfect consumption slave. They buy what they're told to buy via peer pressure feedback loops and stay at home contended with their entertainment bubble.
    - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
      People complaining they don't have money for groceries with their collection of different colored $40 stainless steel mugs in the background.
  - spiffytech 2y ago
    > but why driver's licenses? Anecdotally from my social circles: youth already hang out online, with any or all of their friends at the same time. Why go somewhere just to see fewer people? And once you're there, are you going to do something besides chat and play games, which works fine online? Older generations saw a driver's license as freedom, but younger generations don't see as much appeal in what a licensed driver is free to do.
dr-detroit 2y ago
[dead]
ravenstine 2y ago
Is there anything that today's youth are doing that isn't in decline? Allegedly, they're drinking less, doing less drugs, having less sex, watching fewer movies, driving less, owning fewer cars, watching sports less often, and so on. Maybe they're playing more games? Or are the youth seemingly doing less overall because the way we are polling them has changed?
- randomNumber7 2y ago
  Phones was already an argument. At least from my observation in germany I would add that it is also maybe due to less opportunities. Here the youth has also less money and less good job opportunities while the cost of living has dramatically increased. When you want to move to a new flat the rent is insane.
  - mock-possum 2y ago
    Weed isn’t exactly expensive though.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - Glawen 2y ago
    Is this really a thing or just repeating their laments? Gen Z are also a very whiny generation that don't seem to tolerate the 'suck it up we all went through the same shit' message. I mean young engineers in my company get paid nicely in comparison to their older peers. Noone can really complain about not finding a flat and live correctly. Moreover they are definitely not into having kids, as they prefer to keep money for leisure, so I really don't buy their whining.
    - KK7NIL 2y ago
      > I mean young engineers in my company get paid nicely in comparison to their older peers. No, they don't, not after you adjust for inflation and housing prices. And young engineers are a very privileged few, the vast majority of young American workers have had it much worse. Good luck getting a respectable job that will allow you to buy a house and raise a family while your wife stays at home without a STEM degree nowadays. And the US education system is uniquely terrible at STEM education before college, meaning many American kids who could have gotten onto the STEM gravy train instead get replaced by immigrants like me.
joshdavham 2y ago
> In 2011, 23.1% of adolescents indicated they were current users, but by 2021, this figure had dropped to 15.8%. I suspect that these results are being confounded by the covid-19 pandemic. Clearly there has been a decline in use, but it’s not clear what’s behind it, especially when teens couldn’t go outside during that time and pass a joint around mouth-to-mouth.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  It was declining before covid hit, and from what I've seen reported (sales etc.) use increased at the start of covid then trended back to normal (declining) rates.
oigursh 2y ago
If you get wasted on anything, or do anything silly, or act weird, someone will pull out a phone and video you. That would have stopped a lot of the testing my limits I did when I was young and even more dumb.
- kkielhofner 2y ago
  > If you get wasted on anything, or do anything silly, or act weird, someone will pull out a phone and video you. Anecdotally this seems to be the key impact. With social media almost everyone now has a "brand" and that brand is typically not supported with a post of you out of it, sloppy, etc. Along those lines, there also seems to be MUCH more emphasis on health - granted superficial health (looking good) but health nonetheless. Fortunately the standards for "ideal beauty" for women especially have shifted from the 90s/2000s no-such-thing-as-too-thin dangerous and extremely unhealthy to a physique that is well-muscled and actually healthy (while being inclusive of different body types). When I'm at the gym and the high school/college kids show up I just can't believe their level of physical fitness and development. Self-selecting given it's the gym but when I was in high school (class of 2002) the most fit kid on the football, basketball, track, volleyball, etc teams would look out of shape next to what appears to be the "average" gym-goer of this generation. The numbers also seem to be quite a bit higher - there are A LOT of these kids hitting it really hard in the gym. Needless to say this clearly obsessive-level focus and work is not supported by using drugs like marijuana and alcohol. If nothing else having a lot of followers is much more important and "cool". If anything I'm more interested in usage statistics of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Some of the physiques, performance, etc I see just don't seem possible to achieve naturally at 16-25.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    'Cause they aren't doing it naturally.
lenerdenator 2y ago
Marijuana is now "the man", complete with licensing and lawsuits. The hip young people are moving on to things that are still transgressive.
_fat_santa 2y ago
My bet is that this all stems from higher housing prices / cost of living. Previously you moved out at 18 or so and moved into a dorm/apartment with folks you age and this dynamic introduced a space where you could experiment with "vices" (alcohol, drugs, sex, parties, etc). Now with cost of living being so insane, kids are instead choosing to live with parents and thus never get a space to experiment like this. And by the time they do have enough money to move out on their own, the "experimentation" phase is largely over.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  On the flip side, the number of kids I see smoking/having sex at their parents houses now blows me away. My generation (millenials) it was a lot more rare to find tolerating/"non-narc" parents. Most of my friends with kids figure they'll do it anyways so might as well let them be safe about it.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    If I was a parent of a teen I would just be glad they are socializing and fucking instead of being depressed in their room alone and doom scrolling.
    - philg_jr 2y ago
      Tbh, they’re probably doing both to some extent.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Doomscrolling while fucking? I certainly hope not
        watwut 2y ago
rifty 2y ago
I think I want to see this juxtaposed against all-type drug usage rates for youth before examining this as a cultural trend towards less drug usage. I have a feeling during this period of drop for marijuana and alcohol with the youth, we will see an increase in prescribed drug usage like SSRI and stimulants by youth, with prescription and lack of it.
d--b 2y ago
Maybe marijuana getting a lot stronger plays a role here? I for one could smoke a joint while I was a teen, but nowadays the stuff makes me super sick every time, like the last two times I had to lie down and ended up barfing before getting better.
wly_cdgr 2y ago
Well yeah, legal things aren't cool. I'm sure they'll find something else that's still illegal to use/abuse/do instead
owenversteeg 2y ago
I'm going to repost a comment of mine from a while ago, because I still believe the main cause is simple: Weed just isn't cool anymore. >[Marijuana] revenues have actually declined on a per-state level for three years now in some states despite inflation. General sales tax receipts are up by 27% since 2020 [0] and meanwhile California's weed sales are down. Even better, until recently they were rising at a rapid pace, having rose 2.82x from Q1 2018 to Q2 2020. [1] >The reason why is obvious to anyone who's attended a party in the last few years: weed isn't cool anymore. Partly by being illegal, it used to be cool, but now it's accessible to anyone. A lot of people had that realization when they heard "oh, I'm into weed now" from their uncool middle-aged uncle whose previous hobbies had included LARPing and painting miniatures. It's not even just about the legality though: smoking a joint is a hell of a lot cooler than sucking on a USB stick that smells like candy grapes, and vapes, being far more convenient, have now been tied to weed's image. Something being cool is far better marketing than any ad ever designed. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QTAXT09QTAXCAT1USYES https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QTAXT09QTAXCAT1USYES [1] https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/dataportal/charts.htm?url=CannabisTaxRevenues https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/dataportal/charts.htm?url=CannabisT...
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  Legal weed sales being down doesn’t necessarily mean people are no longer using it. It just means people aren’t buying it legally and paying taxes.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    So many people who want to have a say regarding policy don't understand this. My country has a particularly high rate of sugar consumption. Are we a nation with a sweet tooth? Hardly, as it's inversely correlated with alcohol consumption as measured via sales figures and the process of moonshine production is greatly enhanced by the use of sugar as feedstock. Meanwhile there's a whole movement that aims to limit alcohol availability in stores. A noble pursuit, but a misguided one, as the reported increases in alcohol sales over the past years are actually a sign of people preferring to buy instead of producing their liquor now that they can afford it.
  - 2y ago
LisperFan 2y ago
I wonder if there is a link to the increased use of Adderall and other ADHD treatments. Younger people may no longer be self-medicating because they have other, more effective alternatives available.
Rallen89 2y ago
A thing I dont see alot of people talking about here is the increase in strength over time. For first time users who experience a more 'modern' weed strain that will mess you up if you dont have a tolerance, I dont think they would try it again soon.
thechronic 2y ago
As with all things, there are probably many interdependent reasons for this drop, but the one for my use is that weed is just too strong these days. When I was 16 in the 90s, weed was mild, bags were filled with seeds, and worst case you'd get some dry mouth and maybe lightheaded after passing a couple joints around or hitting a gravity bong in your friend's parent's sink. Now you take a couple hits of some joint that turns out is 25%+ THC and dipped in kief and you're taking a cold shower wondering if you're a waste of life (you're not). It's just not fun, and the people I know that love weed are likely addicted and hiding from their feelings. As an adult my favorite weed experiences have been hanging with locals in Jamaica smoking some regular outdoors sitting on the beach trying to understand the patois. The opposite of walking into an LED flooded store in Manhattan or whatever that store that thinks they're the Apple store is in LA that gives me migraines. I feel like the industry got into an arms race and forgot that weed is to relax amongst friends, not get blasted into oblivion.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Ye it is really bad. It is like having a beer, but it might be vodka tasting like beer. You'll find out after the glass is half empty. Cannabis was a 'safe' drug compared synthetic ones you could accept without worrying too much about its content.
easymodex 2y ago
I will quote one of the nested comments which really hit the mark imo: """I think the definition of "ruin your life" is different now than it was in the 80s. Stakes are higher for kids now, and one little mistake can put you on the road to the have-nots instead of the haves. Back when I was in high school, you could make mistakes and still end up successful. You could get a few B's in your grades, you could decide not to do so many sports and extracurriculars, you could get detention, you could even get in light trouble with the police for horsing around--and still make it into a good University and move on to a good career. I know because I made all of those mistakes. Plus, the consequences for being mediocre were not too severe. B students had community college, C and D students had decent jobs at the mill and the factory or could learn a trade, and so on. Today, the bar for entry into a comfortable, middle class career is so high, that my kid needs to make zero mistakes. She has to get straight As, she has to stay out of any kind of trouble, she has to have the right polished "profile" for all the various career- and life-gatekeepers she will meet and need to pass. And if she doesn't pass the gatekeepers, where is she going to end up? There is no safety net and no real humane jobs left for lower-performers. Life is so much more bifurcated now, the kids know it, and they stress about not making a mis-step. In the 80s I was competing with my small town. Now, kids are competing with the entire world.""" This nails it, the bar for "normal" life is really high, coupled with social media where every day you're bombarded with what you can achieve if you try really hard or pay enough money for it - traveling, having fun, luxury, having a perfect body and being envied by other people, etc. Being an overachiever try-hard is cool these days. Weed makes you a bit lazy and when you smoke you're not 100% super productive and you're not living your life to your "fullest potential".
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  The interesting thing about this - if we assume for a moment that it is true, which I think it mostly is - is that it implies one of three things should be true. ----- CASE 1: This gatekeeping is wrong, and is actually excluding a lot of good people and imposing a lot of arbitrary if not outright stupid requirements. In that case, there ought to be a huge market inefficiency. You should be able to build an elite university by finding all the smart people who didn't do a bunch of dumb signaling extracurriculars, or build a great company by hiring all the smart people who don't have great resumes, etc. CASE 2: This gatekeeping would be wrong in isolation, but the smartest people mostly "play the game", and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we collectively agreed that smart people spend six months when they're 16 hopping on one foot in a purple clown suit, then everyone smart would do that, and it would actually become a good signal of e.g. conscientiousness and class. CASE 3: This gatekeeping is right even in isolation, and we've gotten to a point where we can, with some reasonable reliability, tell who really won't amount to anything. And if that's the case...is it really a matter of hard work or virtue if we can tell ahead of time what you will or won't succeed at? And if it isn't, is it just to leave you to suffer because you happen not to be gifted in particular ways, whether in intelligence or in motivation or in class signals? ---- I'm not really sure which one of these is true, to be honest. I've got my chips on case 1 at the moment, but I have no idea whether I'm right. And I think it's a decent ethical test to ask yourself what you believe about "meritocracy" in each of those cases. Personally, I think: - In case 1, we don't really run into a conflict, because the incentives run the right direction. The market is just being irrational right now, and you can make your fortune exploiting that irrationality. That would be great news! The problem in case 1 ought to solve itself, if perhaps only to create new variants of the same problem. - In case 2, the problem is fundamentally one of class. Like a peacock's tail, we've effectively created a system that demands costly signals of ability, signals that are costly to everyone. If that's the case, we should figure out how to minimize the "peacock factor" as best we can, perhaps via some form of regulation, so that we're not wasting a bunch of resources on things that fundamentally don't matter. - In case 3, the problem is fundamentally one of (somewhat indelible) inequality. Some people will be ahead, and others behind, and it's not a matter of their decisions, but of their personalities or natures or formative experiences or whatever. And in that case, I'm not sure the idea of competing for a place in the world has any ethical justification, because it effectively means we reward those whose lives will already be inherently better and punish those whose lives will already be worse. Case 3 would undermine the entire case for a competitive social system, really.
ShepherdKing 2y ago
Communication about health risks for marijuana use needs to be on-point, especially among young people. From what I've read, use during brain development (prior to ages 25-30) risks learning disabilities and other mental health disorders due to how it affects cortisol. Marijuana is also an immune system suppressor, which may explain some elevated cancer rates. The effects on the immune system may also explain some food allergies, but susceptibility for fungal and viral infections resulting from marijuana use is fairly well established. Citing some relevant papers on the subject: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8229290/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8229290/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7258471/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7258471/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3930618/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3930618/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4586361/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4586361/
wayoverthecloud 2y ago
I was a teen a few years back who stopped doing marijuana/alcohol. Stopped like in never even seen them since I quit/no relapse. I stopped because my childhood friends started dissipating and they stopped and then I stopped. Doing weed/alcohol alone didn't appeal to me much.
DrPimienta 2y ago
Why delete the comments?
tyronee 2y ago
[dead]

115 points by geox 2y ago

>“In the U.S. the current landscape of marijuana legalization in adults adds a complex layer to the issues of adolescent marijuana use. As more states continue to legalize recreational marijuana, the accessibility and perceived normalcy of the drug may increase, particularly for adolescents who may view its legal status as an indication of safety or acceptability,” said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D. Interesting to read this in an article about how marijuana use has gone down in the time since legalization efforts have started to see success. It almost seems comically out of touch.

anovikov 2y ago
So you think that the research is wrong? I see it as very plausible. Kids like to break rules and long for forbidden fruits. When weed is no longer forbidden, they have no interest in it just as they see little interest in getting drunk.
- theboogieman 2y ago
  Add the fact that, if legal marijuana is priced low enough to make black market dealers less common, the people selling the marijuana will now be forced to only sell to people 21+. I’m not saying that this is the case as legal recreational marijuana sale prices in many legal states are high enough (due to taxes or artificial supply dampening due to restricting who can grow it and how much) to justify the existence of a black market, but if that was the case, I’d expect a drop off in youth usage.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    I think this overstates the interest in drugs among Zillenials and Gen Z. Most people in our cohort tend to follow a "you do you" philosophy that cuts both ways - if you choose to or choose not to partake in marijuana or alcohol, that's your choice. Stuff like "marijuana" or "alcohol" isn't viewed as cool or uncool, it's just viewed as a yet another consumable like coffee or sugar. Same way some people choose to cut down on coffee and others are coffee fiends, it's similar with booze and weed. Personally, I find that older generations have an unhealthily polarized view on weed and alcohol consumption - they are split between the "weed cures everything" and "weed is the devil's lettuce" camps. Heck, even this thread has tinges of judgement about how younger generations just don't care one way or the other about weed as if weed consumption is a core part of being young.
    - graypegg 2y ago
      I guess I'm a zillenial, born 1998. I distinctly remember a time in highschool where I saw vaping (the flavoured cartridge kind) shift from cool, to just some meaningless detail about someone. I totally think this shift has stuck. You're 100% right in comparing weed in this context to coffee, that exact same pattern happened to vaping too. It's not like there WASN'T drinking, vaping, and weed. Just no one is pushing it on you. The pushing is a lot more focused on social (and online) things now. But that's a different topic. I'm on board for it being a good thing. The kids are alright eh?
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        > It's not like there WASN'T drinking, vaping, and weed. Just no one is pushing it on you. The pushing is a lot more focused on social (and online) things now. But that's a different topic. Exactly! > I'm on board for it being a good thing. The kids are alright eh? That's my opinion as well, but I'm part of the Zillenial cohort as well so I'm biased.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    >if legal marijuana is priced low enough to make black market dealers less common, It never is. The overhead from running a lawful business is way higher even before you start accounting for all the weed specific cost of compliance stuff.
    - standardUser 2y ago
      It varies from state to state, but legal prices are comparable to black market prices in a lot of places. And the selection available in legal markets is beyond compare.
    - mezzie2 2y ago
      Oh, it can be. I live in MI and weed is really, really cheap here. I don't smoke, but I partake in edibles (I have MS and nerve pain that meds can't do much about). I can get 2000mg of edibles for 40 bucks. And that's without price comparing: That's just going to the closest dispensary near my house. And lots of places do penny/free joints with a very low/no minimum purchase.
    - marssaxman 2y ago
      That's not the case here in Washington state: legal weed is significantly cheaper than the black-market ever was, unless you want some high-end specialty bud you most likely couldn't have gotten at all back then.
    - kredd 2y ago
      We've had legal marijuana since 2018 up here in Canada, and from the statistics it looks like the market has almost caught up. The closest comparison I can think of is piracy and beginning of streaming wars (like Spotify and Netflix). Sure piracy is free, but a significant chunk of people started subbing for the services because of the convenience. If you'll only save about $5 per purchase, but have to get cash, arrange everything and etc., that might be just enough friction for you to just go to one of the billion stores nearby.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      A conspicuous absence of black market for other herbal products such as tea and cilantro indicates that the edge of the black market over the lawful businesses isn't that great, if extant at all.
- skyyler 2y ago
  >So you think that the research is wrong? I think a poorly designed study can confirm pre-existing biases instead of actually test for anything. Stating that "research suggests" something doesn't actually mean much to me anymore. I'd love to know what research suggests that “marijuana legalization in adults can influence adolescent behavior through their perceptions of less risk as well as increased availability, both of which may impede efforts to reduce adolescent use.” The numbers this article is reporting seem to suggest the opposite.
  - StackRanker3000 2y ago
    I think the other person just mistook your point and thought that you were implying that marijuana use _hasn’t_ actually gone down.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I suspect the research is reasonably accurate, but you will always have someone voicing the position of safyism, caution, and whataboutism.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I think there's a bit more at play. Let's contrast with buying hard drugs like meth. If you want to buy meth, you have to figure out how to get in contact with the sorts of people who'll be holding it. That means hanging out where they hang out and blending in to the point they trust you. By the time you've done all that, you've got some sunk costs invested in making connections with drug dealers. You're kind of bought into the whole ecosystem. In places where weed is legal, you can go into a store, buy some, try it, and if you decide it's not for you, just don't do it again. I don't use weed, but yesterday I walked into a liquor store to buy a stout beer I like. I didn't have to hang out and party with the clerk to get her to trust me enough to sell me my beer. I gave her some money, she handed me a shopping bag, and that's the end of it. That's what it's like buying weed from a dispensary now. TL;DR if you don't have to hang out with drug dealers to buy drugs, you might be less inclined to buy more stuff from drug dealers.
  - dfxm12 2y ago
    To add, dealers aren't referred to as "pushers" for no reason, either.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Good point. No one at a beer store has ever tried to talk me into buying more than I wanted, except maybe boredly pointing to some display and saying "we have X on sale if you want some."
  - throwup238 2y ago
    > By the time you've done all that, you've got some sunk costs invested in making connections with drug dealers. You're kind of bought into the whole ecosystem. Shortcut: go the biggest hospital near you and find the fast food joint nearest the ER entrance. The drug users discharged after OD treatment will gather there and the dealers find then.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      You know, that's the kind of thing that seems perfectly obvious once you've pointed it out, but it wouldn't have occurred to me.
- pizza234 2y ago
  > When weed is no longer forbidden, they have no interest in it just as they see little interest in getting drunk. I believe drugs (incl. alcohool) are a considerably more complex habits. Getting intoxicated have socially desirable outcomes (if one ignores the downsides), unrelated to unavailability. Some drugs like weed can also be part of rituals (e.g. "meeting and getting stoned").
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  I think it’s because there are less illegal weed dealers. Which means there are less people willing to sell to kids. Basically making it legal has made it harder for kids to get.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Vapes are edge and easy enough to get. Weed is popular among millennials, which are now the “cringe” generation so there’s that as well. Weed just isn’t as cool as it was before.
    - throaway89 2y ago
      Yup. Hasn't been cool in Canada since legalization, but a lot of milennials still cling to it
      - dingnuts 2y ago
        weird implication that millennials only did it originally out of a desire to be cool, and are still doing it "to be cool" some people just like it more than alcohol, wtf
        dartos 2y ago
        I like it more than alcohol, but as a teenager it was definitely just to be cool.
  - tmn 2y ago
    It is not hard at all to find a 21 year old to buy some legally and pass it on for a small tip.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tmn 2y ago
  Weed and alcohol remain forbidden due to age restrictions. But anecdotally, I grew up in the 90's and 00's. When weed was outright illegal and alcohol was as it currently is. There was plenty of desire to get drunk among minors. Weed had some but very little presence in my area. Today the weed presence is much more on par with alcohol among highschoolers (or so I'm told) where I'm from.
- smeej 2y ago
  My parents actually used this as a strategy when my sister and I were teens 20+ years ago. They casually offered that, as children of the '70s, there really weren't any drugs they hadn't tried, so if I was interested in any, I could just let them know and they'd get them and we could do them together. Made it seem as uncool as humanly possible, so I never tried. By the time our youngest brother was a teen, they'd gotten overconfident in their success and never made the offer to him. He eventually quit using, but it took 12 steps and a lot of time and effort my sister and I were spared!
  - m463 2y ago
    lol, same thing happened to a friend with cigarettes when they were a kid. Slightly different though - parents offered a cigarette during the time when they would say "Bleeeeech! this is horrible!" I think it headed off the time later when they wouldn't be able to react in front of their peers.
- rozap 2y ago
  Or it's legitimately harder to get. In high school we used to smoke weed because it was easy to get (friendly local neighborhood dealer didn't check ID) and very rarely drank alcohol because it was tricky to find.
- m463 2y ago
  I kind of think teenagers aren't into all the different boutique wines, and legal marijuana is sort of giving off the same "older people" vibe.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
This is not a new trend: https://usafacts.org/articles/is-teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-declining/ https://usafacts.org/articles/is-teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-d... Alcohol and other drug use, teen pregnancy, and sex in general have been declining in teens in the West for more than a decade.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - standardUser 2y ago
    > I'd rather deal with a teen pregnancy epidemic than the current situation of rising authoritarianism, isolationism, and reactionary turn that we are seeing from the youth of today. You mean the male youth of today.
    - NemoNobody 2y ago
      Ok, I understand your point but let's be real for a minute and just acknowledge that the worse situation that you can get. I'd rather hear about how what is happening with young men today was happening with young women than men - not that that would be better but it would be less dangerous. Young men that are disenfranchised from their society and have little to live for are a primary metric political scientists use to measure the stability of country. Historically speaking, once a society gets too many men like that, the society ends. This isn't a battle of the sexes and women do not win bc of what has happened with men.
      - standardUser 2y ago
        Historically speaking, we have never seen a society where women have more education, wealth and status than men. This is uncharted territory. Not that I don't fear the repercussions of having the bottom 50% of men desperate and disenfranchised. But those bottom 50% of men don't guarantee societal collapse because they're not then ones propping it up, women are. The question might be, what will women and higher status men do about the problems caused by the bottom half men?

s1artibartfast 2y ago

I wonder how much of this is attributable to legalization or other factors. Teen Alcohol use has gone down ~50% over the last 30 years, and but there has been no legalization effort there. Similarly, teen sex rate has also gone down ~50% over the same time period. Overall, abstention from behaviors seems to be a major trend. I would be curious to know if this is due to a cultural aversion to perceived risky behaviors, lack of autonomy, or some other factor like rate of behavior modification medicine.

ToDougie 2y ago
Some ideas: Parents are being cautious with their (statistically fewer) children. Prevalence of CCTV and panopticon theory making risky behavior seem impossible. Disappearance of third spaces. Crazy homeless druggies everywhere. Consequences of abuse are far more obvious.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Proliferation of scheduled stuff beyond the school day leaving less free time to engage in activities that can't be done on a screen. I think your comment about homeless is too specific to certain regions.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Or, the "always there" nature of screen activities makes it very easy to never do anything else. When I was a kid we had no mobile phones, nor did we have computers or internet. if you wanted to talk with your friends you had to go meet up with them in person. So hanging out at the mall or at a park or an arcade was pretty common. So were after-school activities, sports, band, clubs, etc. A lot of this stuff, being away from home, was marginally or totally unsupervised, so there was a lot more opportunity to try "illegal" things.
tayo42 2y ago
I think I've seen the sex thing attributed to the "loneliness epidemic" and internet use that comes up alot. If that is true, makes sense for the same cause to apply to smoking and drinking. Drinking beers by yourself as a teen is weird, you generally at least start that stuff with friends.

hx8 2y ago

How accurate can youth self reported drug usage statistics actually be? It seems like the type of thing that would sway heavily based on if the kids were in a serious mood or a playful mood, who was giving the survey, etc.

moomin 2y ago
The good news is it doesn’t really matter. The absolute numbers might be inaccurate, but the skew is likely to stay the same over decades. So it probably is dropping.
- elliottkember 2y ago
  > the skew is likely to stay the same over decades This is a huge assumption.
  - hx8 2y ago
    Yeah, I don't agree with that at all. A simple change such as "More schools are giving the survey right before standardized tests instead of at the end of the school day" may skew numbers over years. Edit: There's probably dozens of variables with how the survey is given that will skew the bias. They probably don't even ask the exact same question in the exact same way on the physical survey.
    - mikem170 2y ago
      > A simple change ... may skew numbers over years Is this your guess, or is there other conflicting data?
      - elliottkember 2y ago
        The point is that we don’t know, and this means the data may be wrong. For an experiment to prove something, you need to control for these variables.

rgbrgb 2y ago

worried about the youth if this is true. are we alienating them from a relatively safe form of mischief and mind expansion by making it legal and socially accepted? hoping that perhaps it's reporting error as kids get smart about surveillance etc. hoping for the kids.

jackcosgrove 2y ago
Kids these days!

chis 2y ago

Teens are basically doing less of everything because of the phones. Alcohol, sex, getting a drivers license, going to movies, basically any activity you could name has declined rapidly starting around 2012 when phones became ubiquitous.

throw09230923 2y ago
Maybe they are just more informed with phones. Memes about permanently stoned people are spreading fast. Propaganda about "cool" hippies does not work any more. The same with myths around sex, real anti-conception effectiveness...
Spivak 2y ago
Except no one has been able to establish any kind of causation. The observation is real but the explanation is dubious. If you consider sex, drugs, and alcohol to be forms of "stuff to do" then it sorta sounds plausible but why driver's licenses? Why not sports or extracurriculars? Why not video games? Why are tabletop rpg getting more popular? You could just as easily blame ubiquitous access to porn for most of this as well and it would be just as plausible.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  TikTok brain rot. Streamers. Influencers. Teens are living their lives vicariously through other people. Capitalism has finally created the perfect consumption slave. They buy what they're told to buy via peer pressure feedback loops and stay at home contended with their entertainment bubble.
  - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    People complaining they don't have money for groceries with their collection of different colored $40 stainless steel mugs in the background.
- spiffytech 2y ago
  > but why driver's licenses? Anecdotally from my social circles: youth already hang out online, with any or all of their friends at the same time. Why go somewhere just to see fewer people? And once you're there, are you going to do something besides chat and play games, which works fine online? Older generations saw a driver's license as freedom, but younger generations don't see as much appeal in what a licensed driver is free to do.

dr-detroit 2y ago

[dead]

ravenstine 2y ago

Is there anything that today's youth are doing that isn't in decline? Allegedly, they're drinking less, doing less drugs, having less sex, watching fewer movies, driving less, owning fewer cars, watching sports less often, and so on. Maybe they're playing more games? Or are the youth seemingly doing less overall because the way we are polling them has changed?

randomNumber7 2y ago
Phones was already an argument. At least from my observation in germany I would add that it is also maybe due to less opportunities. Here the youth has also less money and less good job opportunities while the cost of living has dramatically increased. When you want to move to a new flat the rent is insane.
- mock-possum 2y ago
  Weed isn’t exactly expensive though.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Glawen 2y ago
  Is this really a thing or just repeating their laments? Gen Z are also a very whiny generation that don't seem to tolerate the 'suck it up we all went through the same shit' message. I mean young engineers in my company get paid nicely in comparison to their older peers. Noone can really complain about not finding a flat and live correctly. Moreover they are definitely not into having kids, as they prefer to keep money for leisure, so I really don't buy their whining.
  - KK7NIL 2y ago
    > I mean young engineers in my company get paid nicely in comparison to their older peers. No, they don't, not after you adjust for inflation and housing prices. And young engineers are a very privileged few, the vast majority of young American workers have had it much worse. Good luck getting a respectable job that will allow you to buy a house and raise a family while your wife stays at home without a STEM degree nowadays. And the US education system is uniquely terrible at STEM education before college, meaning many American kids who could have gotten onto the STEM gravy train instead get replaced by immigrants like me.

joshdavham 2y ago

> In 2011, 23.1% of adolescents indicated they were current users, but by 2021, this figure had dropped to 15.8%. I suspect that these results are being confounded by the covid-19 pandemic. Clearly there has been a decline in use, but it’s not clear what’s behind it, especially when teens couldn’t go outside during that time and pass a joint around mouth-to-mouth.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
It was declining before covid hit, and from what I've seen reported (sales etc.) use increased at the start of covid then trended back to normal (declining) rates.

oigursh 2y ago

If you get wasted on anything, or do anything silly, or act weird, someone will pull out a phone and video you. That would have stopped a lot of the testing my limits I did when I was young and even more dumb.

kkielhofner 2y ago
> If you get wasted on anything, or do anything silly, or act weird, someone will pull out a phone and video you. Anecdotally this seems to be the key impact. With social media almost everyone now has a "brand" and that brand is typically not supported with a post of you out of it, sloppy, etc. Along those lines, there also seems to be MUCH more emphasis on health - granted superficial health (looking good) but health nonetheless. Fortunately the standards for "ideal beauty" for women especially have shifted from the 90s/2000s no-such-thing-as-too-thin dangerous and extremely unhealthy to a physique that is well-muscled and actually healthy (while being inclusive of different body types). When I'm at the gym and the high school/college kids show up I just can't believe their level of physical fitness and development. Self-selecting given it's the gym but when I was in high school (class of 2002) the most fit kid on the football, basketball, track, volleyball, etc teams would look out of shape next to what appears to be the "average" gym-goer of this generation. The numbers also seem to be quite a bit higher - there are A LOT of these kids hitting it really hard in the gym. Needless to say this clearly obsessive-level focus and work is not supported by using drugs like marijuana and alcohol. If nothing else having a lot of followers is much more important and "cool". If anything I'm more interested in usage statistics of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Some of the physiques, performance, etc I see just don't seem possible to achieve naturally at 16-25.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  'Cause they aren't doing it naturally.

lenerdenator 2y ago

Marijuana is now "the man", complete with licensing and lawsuits. The hip young people are moving on to things that are still transgressive.

_fat_santa 2y ago

My bet is that this all stems from higher housing prices / cost of living. Previously you moved out at 18 or so and moved into a dorm/apartment with folks you age and this dynamic introduced a space where you could experiment with "vices" (alcohol, drugs, sex, parties, etc). Now with cost of living being so insane, kids are instead choosing to live with parents and thus never get a space to experiment like this. And by the time they do have enough money to move out on their own, the "experimentation" phase is largely over.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
On the flip side, the number of kids I see smoking/having sex at their parents houses now blows me away. My generation (millenials) it was a lot more rare to find tolerating/"non-narc" parents. Most of my friends with kids figure they'll do it anyways so might as well let them be safe about it.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  If I was a parent of a teen I would just be glad they are socializing and fucking instead of being depressed in their room alone and doom scrolling.
  - philg_jr 2y ago
    Tbh, they’re probably doing both to some extent.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Doomscrolling while fucking? I certainly hope not
      - watwut 2y ago

rifty 2y ago

I think I want to see this juxtaposed against all-type drug usage rates for youth before examining this as a cultural trend towards less drug usage. I have a feeling during this period of drop for marijuana and alcohol with the youth, we will see an increase in prescribed drug usage like SSRI and stimulants by youth, with prescription and lack of it.

d--b 2y ago

Maybe marijuana getting a lot stronger plays a role here? I for one could smoke a joint while I was a teen, but nowadays the stuff makes me super sick every time, like the last two times I had to lie down and ended up barfing before getting better.

wly_cdgr 2y ago

Well yeah, legal things aren't cool. I'm sure they'll find something else that's still illegal to use/abuse/do instead

owenversteeg 2y ago

I'm going to repost a comment of mine from a while ago, because I still believe the main cause is simple: Weed just isn't cool anymore. >[Marijuana] revenues have actually declined on a per-state level for three years now in some states despite inflation. General sales tax receipts are up by 27% since 2020 [0] and meanwhile California's weed sales are down. Even better, until recently they were rising at a rapid pace, having rose 2.82x from Q1 2018 to Q2 2020. [1] >The reason why is obvious to anyone who's attended a party in the last few years: weed isn't cool anymore. Partly by being illegal, it used to be cool, but now it's accessible to anyone. A lot of people had that realization when they heard "oh, I'm into weed now" from their uncool middle-aged uncle whose previous hobbies had included LARPing and painting miniatures. It's not even just about the legality though: smoking a joint is a hell of a lot cooler than sucking on a USB stick that smells like candy grapes, and vapes, being far more convenient, have now been tied to weed's image. Something being cool is far better marketing than any ad ever designed. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QTAXT09QTAXCAT1USYES https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QTAXT09QTAXCAT1USYES [1] https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/dataportal/charts.htm?url=CannabisTaxRevenues https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/dataportal/charts.htm?url=CannabisT...

darth_avocado 2y ago
Legal weed sales being down doesn’t necessarily mean people are no longer using it. It just means people aren’t buying it legally and paying taxes.
- Tade0 2y ago
  So many people who want to have a say regarding policy don't understand this. My country has a particularly high rate of sugar consumption. Are we a nation with a sweet tooth? Hardly, as it's inversely correlated with alcohol consumption as measured via sales figures and the process of moonshine production is greatly enhanced by the use of sugar as feedstock. Meanwhile there's a whole movement that aims to limit alcohol availability in stores. A noble pursuit, but a misguided one, as the reported increases in alcohol sales over the past years are actually a sign of people preferring to buy instead of producing their liquor now that they can afford it.
- 2y ago

LisperFan 2y ago

I wonder if there is a link to the increased use of Adderall and other ADHD treatments. Younger people may no longer be self-medicating because they have other, more effective alternatives available.

Rallen89 2y ago

A thing I dont see alot of people talking about here is the increase in strength over time. For first time users who experience a more 'modern' weed strain that will mess you up if you dont have a tolerance, I dont think they would try it again soon.

thechronic 2y ago

As with all things, there are probably many interdependent reasons for this drop, but the one for my use is that weed is just too strong these days. When I was 16 in the 90s, weed was mild, bags were filled with seeds, and worst case you'd get some dry mouth and maybe lightheaded after passing a couple joints around or hitting a gravity bong in your friend's parent's sink. Now you take a couple hits of some joint that turns out is 25%+ THC and dipped in kief and you're taking a cold shower wondering if you're a waste of life (you're not). It's just not fun, and the people I know that love weed are likely addicted and hiding from their feelings. As an adult my favorite weed experiences have been hanging with locals in Jamaica smoking some regular outdoors sitting on the beach trying to understand the patois. The opposite of walking into an LED flooded store in Manhattan or whatever that store that thinks they're the Apple store is in LA that gives me migraines. I feel like the industry got into an arms race and forgot that weed is to relax amongst friends, not get blasted into oblivion.

rightbyte 2y ago
Ye it is really bad. It is like having a beer, but it might be vodka tasting like beer. You'll find out after the glass is half empty. Cannabis was a 'safe' drug compared synthetic ones you could accept without worrying too much about its content.

easymodex 2y ago

I will quote one of the nested comments which really hit the mark imo: """I think the definition of "ruin your life" is different now than it was in the 80s. Stakes are higher for kids now, and one little mistake can put you on the road to the have-nots instead of the haves. Back when I was in high school, you could make mistakes and still end up successful. You could get a few B's in your grades, you could decide not to do so many sports and extracurriculars, you could get detention, you could even get in light trouble with the police for horsing around--and still make it into a good University and move on to a good career. I know because I made all of those mistakes. Plus, the consequences for being mediocre were not too severe. B students had community college, C and D students had decent jobs at the mill and the factory or could learn a trade, and so on. Today, the bar for entry into a comfortable, middle class career is so high, that my kid needs to make zero mistakes. She has to get straight As, she has to stay out of any kind of trouble, she has to have the right polished "profile" for all the various career- and life-gatekeepers she will meet and need to pass. And if she doesn't pass the gatekeepers, where is she going to end up? There is no safety net and no real humane jobs left for lower-performers. Life is so much more bifurcated now, the kids know it, and they stress about not making a mis-step. In the 80s I was competing with my small town. Now, kids are competing with the entire world.""" This nails it, the bar for "normal" life is really high, coupled with social media where every day you're bombarded with what you can achieve if you try really hard or pay enough money for it - traveling, having fun, luxury, having a perfect body and being envied by other people, etc. Being an overachiever try-hard is cool these days. Weed makes you a bit lazy and when you smoke you're not 100% super productive and you're not living your life to your "fullest potential".

rachofsunshine 2y ago
The interesting thing about this - if we assume for a moment that it is true, which I think it mostly is - is that it implies one of three things should be true. ----- CASE 1: This gatekeeping is wrong, and is actually excluding a lot of good people and imposing a lot of arbitrary if not outright stupid requirements. In that case, there ought to be a huge market inefficiency. You should be able to build an elite university by finding all the smart people who didn't do a bunch of dumb signaling extracurriculars, or build a great company by hiring all the smart people who don't have great resumes, etc. CASE 2: This gatekeeping would be wrong in isolation, but the smartest people mostly "play the game", and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we collectively agreed that smart people spend six months when they're 16 hopping on one foot in a purple clown suit, then everyone smart would do that, and it would actually become a good signal of e.g. conscientiousness and class. CASE 3: This gatekeeping is right even in isolation, and we've gotten to a point where we can, with some reasonable reliability, tell who really won't amount to anything. And if that's the case...is it really a matter of hard work or virtue if we can tell ahead of time what you will or won't succeed at? And if it isn't, is it just to leave you to suffer because you happen not to be gifted in particular ways, whether in intelligence or in motivation or in class signals? ---- I'm not really sure which one of these is true, to be honest. I've got my chips on case 1 at the moment, but I have no idea whether I'm right. And I think it's a decent ethical test to ask yourself what you believe about "meritocracy" in each of those cases. Personally, I think: - In case 1, we don't really run into a conflict, because the incentives run the right direction. The market is just being irrational right now, and you can make your fortune exploiting that irrationality. That would be great news! The problem in case 1 ought to solve itself, if perhaps only to create new variants of the same problem. - In case 2, the problem is fundamentally one of class. Like a peacock's tail, we've effectively created a system that demands costly signals of ability, signals that are costly to everyone. If that's the case, we should figure out how to minimize the "peacock factor" as best we can, perhaps via some form of regulation, so that we're not wasting a bunch of resources on things that fundamentally don't matter. - In case 3, the problem is fundamentally one of (somewhat indelible) inequality. Some people will be ahead, and others behind, and it's not a matter of their decisions, but of their personalities or natures or formative experiences or whatever. And in that case, I'm not sure the idea of competing for a place in the world has any ethical justification, because it effectively means we reward those whose lives will already be inherently better and punish those whose lives will already be worse. Case 3 would undermine the entire case for a competitive social system, really.

ShepherdKing 2y ago

Communication about health risks for marijuana use needs to be on-point, especially among young people. From what I've read, use during brain development (prior to ages 25-30) risks learning disabilities and other mental health disorders due to how it affects cortisol. Marijuana is also an immune system suppressor, which may explain some elevated cancer rates. The effects on the immune system may also explain some food allergies, but susceptibility for fungal and viral infections resulting from marijuana use is fairly well established. Citing some relevant papers on the subject: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8229290/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8229290/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7258471/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7258471/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3930618/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3930618/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4586361/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4586361/

wayoverthecloud 2y ago

I was a teen a few years back who stopped doing marijuana/alcohol. Stopped like in never even seen them since I quit/no relapse. I stopped because my childhood friends started dissipating and they stopped and then I stopped. Doing weed/alcohol alone didn't appeal to me much.

DrPimienta 2y ago

Why delete the comments?

tyronee 2y ago

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