The trouble was, they didn’t really have a lot of data to back up their claims. But now they do.
In the lead-up to the legalization pushes in several states a decade or so ago, prohibitionists made all kinds of wild, and unfounded, claims about how legal weed would result in more kids getting stoned more often.
But advocates for adult-use legalization were left to make their own unfounded claims. The research backing up the idea that youth consumption wouldn’t rise was scant and far from conclusive.
Nearly a decade on from Washington and Colorado legalizing adult-use cannabis, and nearly four years into California’s regime of legal weed, the truth of the matter is clear.
Just before the JAMA study was released, Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, appeared on a podcast hosted by Ethan Nadelmann, the former director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance.
Department of Education looked at youth surveys between 2009 and 2019, and found “no measurable difference” in pot use among teens in states that became legal.
As more suburban parents buy weed at legal dispensaries and use it more-or-less openly, it increasingly becomes a thing boring, old adults do—sort of like Facebook—and therefore less convincing as a sign of rebelliousness.