Survey: Smoking teens pick marijuana over tobacco
By Amy CrawfordTRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Teenage marijuana use has risen for the third year in a row, according to results of a nationwide survey released Tuesday.
For the first time in the annual survey, titled "Monitoring the Future," more high schoolers reported smoking marijuana than tobacco — a twist that points to changing attitudes toward the country's most popular illegal drug.
"The information is particularly disturbing regarding youth use, particularly among eighth-graders," U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said during a news conference in Washington to announce the survey results.
Among eighth-graders, more than 17 percent reported that they had used marijuana. A third of 10th-graders and 44 percent of high school seniors said they had used the drug.
The survey, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and conducted by the University of Michigan among more than 46,000 students nationwide, has found upticks of one or more percentage points for the past three years after a downward trend beginning in the mid-1990s. Most other illegal drug use has held steady, near record lows.
"I'm not really surprised," said Jerry Roman, principal for ninth- and 12th-graders at Bethel Park High School. "We hear, from talking to our students, just from the pulse of the school, that marijuana use may be up."
Buzz Yakshe, resource officer for the Franklin Regional School District, said only one student there has been arrested for marijuana this year. While underage drinking is still his biggest concern, he said marijuana poses its own challenges for law enforcement.
"Marijuana is a lot easier to get," Yakshe said. "If you're going to get alcohol, an adult has to buy it. Marijuana — these kids know the dealers. It's a lot easier to conceal."
Nicole Kurash, clinical manager of youth programs at Gateway Rehabilitation Center, which treats up to 500 teens across Southwest Pennsylvania each year, said she had noticed changing attitudes toward marijuana, especially among parents.
"I would definitely say the attitude is much more relaxed than a decade ago," she said. "We see a number of kids whose parents smoke marijuana. We see parents who say, 'I don't mind if they smoke it, but I don't want them to do anything else.' "
While teens seem well aware that tobacco causes cancer, Kurash said, they appear not to realize that marijuana use also has been linked to cancer.
"We hear kids saying, 'It's natural. It comes from the ground. It can't be bad,' " she said.
The attitude shift that Kurash noticed was reflected in the survey, which showed a decrease in teens who saw marijuana as carrying "great risk" or who disapproved of using it regularly.
Patrick Nightingale, a criminal defense attorney and director of Pittsburgh's chapter of The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, attributed the shift to a backlash against the United States' decades-long war on drugs.
"I think that more and more people who may once have been anti-cannabis are saying, 'Wait a minute. What benefit are we actually getting from spending these tremendous amounts of money?' " said Nightingale, who supports the legalization and regulation of marijuana.
Noting that alcohol is legal and widely advertised despite its psychoactive properties, he said, "there has never been a fight on (Pittsburgh's) South Side as a result of someone smoking too much pot."
Nightingale is not the only advocate to draw parallels between marijuana and alcohol.
Mike Meno, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, said the results of the teen survey show that marijuana should be legalized.
"We think that marijuana should be regulated like alcohol," he said. Right now, Meno explained, "marijuana is sold in an illicit market by drug dealers who are not required to check ID."
More and more Americans agree with him. An October Gallup Poll showed support for legalization of marijuana at 46 percent, an all-time high. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia recently passed medical marijuana laws. While some, including the nation's drug czar, have said this sends the wrong message to teens, a Marijuana Policy Project study found that marijuana use among teens decreased in each state after the drug was legalized.
Still, the legalization of marijuana remains controversial, especially among those who work with substance-abusing teens.
"I think marijuana is a much more harmful drug than people give it credit for," said Russell Carlino, administrator of juvenile probation in Allegheny County. "We see performance in school go down. We see recidivism, a whole host of issues. It's a harmful product."
