USA Today reveals its out of step with Americans on marijuana policy reform
Yesterday, USA Today’s editorial board announced its opposition to the marijuana legalization initiatives facing voters in five states on Election Day. The board begins:
As voters in five states consider ballot measures next month to legalize marijuana for recreational use, supporters and opponents can pluck a statistic to back just about anything they want to argue about the issue. But amid a gaggle of dueling studies, the truth is that the state experiments in legalizing recreational use are still too new to yield definitive results about the harms and benefits to society.
In Colorado and Washington state, the first to legalize, retail stores did not open until 2014. As the Colorado Department of Public Safety asserted in its first post-legalization report this year: It is too early to draw any conclusions about the potential effects of marijuana legalization or commercialization on public safety, public health or youth outcomes.
It’s new. But it’s not just new: it’s scary. We don’t know what it’ll do to our teenagers.
Oddly, however, the board relies on a Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment survey to support its opposition. It writes:
Another unanswered question is whether legalization for adults will lead to more use by adolescents. In Colorado the answer during the first year is a tiny increase, according to federal and local surveys.
At the very least, the board is being disingenuous by manipulating the departments findings–you might say it “pluck[ed] a statistic” to support its opposition to legalization. While the rate of weekly teen marijuana use indeed increased from 19.7 percent to 21.2 percent between 2013 and 2015, the 2015 rate is actually down from that of 2009–the year Colorado legalized medical marijuana–at which time it was 24.8 percent. Moreover, even accepting the board’s use of 2013 as the most reliable date of comparison, the executive director of the department that conducted the study said that the “tiny increase” in teen use is statistically insignificant.
What’s notable about the board’s characterization of the department’s findings is how it conflicts with how the survey findings were received in Colorado and elsewhere. Most source noted that teenage marijuana use was statistically stagnant, and that the survey results actually assuaged some fears. For example, the executive director of the department that conducted the survey told The Denver Post, “I’m heartened, as I think many folks are, by the results.”
Then, as if to suggest some connection between views on risk and teen use, the board the observes that the number of teens who view weekly marijuana use as having no risk has risen. However, this suggestion is tenuous at best. As The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham reported:
Like the national survey that came out earlier this month, the state-level data show significant decreases in the percentage of teens who say there’s a “great risk of harm from smoking marijuana once a month.” This has traditionally been understood as a risk factor for increased marijuana use — if kids don’t think pot is harmful, they’ll be more likely to try it.
But that pattern hasn’t held true over the past few years. Perceptions of risk are decreasing, and use among teens is flat. “Maybe this cohort is just plain well-behaved, but not being afraid of pot doesn’t seem to be leading them to use a lot of it,” Kleiman said.
(see, e.g. here, here, and here).
Perhaps the board also worries that the normalization of legalized recreational marijuana use in some states will lead to increased teen usage nationally. But, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that marijuana use by 12- to 17-year-olds is down nationally. The report found:
Stratifying the data by age, an increase in past year and past month daily or almost daily use occurred among almost all persons aged ≥18 years, but a decrease occurred among persons aged 12–17 years (Table 4).
And, teenagers in states that have legalized recreational marijuana use find it no easier to gain access to the drug.