Study: Daily pot smoking impacts grad rates
By Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post
Pre-rolled marijuana joints are pictured at the Sea of Green Farms in Seattle, Washington June 30, 2014. REUTERS/Jason Redmond
Teenagers who smoke marijuana daily are over 60 percent less likely to complete high school than those who never use. They’re also 60 percent less likely to graduate college and seven times more likely to attempt suicide. Those are the startling conclusions of a new study of adolescent cannabis use out today in The Lancet Psychiatry, a British journal of health research.
Researchers gathered data on the frequency of cannabis use among 3,725 students from Australian and New Zealand, and then looked at the students’ developmental outcomes up to the age of 30. They found “clear and consistent associations between frequency of cannabis use during adolescence and most young adult outcomes investigated, even after controlling for 53 potential confounding factors including age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, use of other drugs, and mental illness.”
Significantly, they found that the risks for negative outcomes increased with the frequency of cannabis use. In a conference call, study co-author Edmund Sillins said that the relationship between cannabis use and negative outcomes is significant even at low levels of use (e.g., less than monthly), and that “the results suggest that there may not be a threshold where use can be deemed safe” for teens.
OMG ……. How could that be ? when everyone claims it’s so harmless …….
All this study shows is that kids who are having trouble in school or are depressed use cannabis to self medicate and provide relief for what is essentially a medical problem. Although teenage use of cannabis is to be discouraged, it is less toxic and more effective than the psychiatric drugs or more dangerous alternatives such as alcohol. The real answer, as pointed out in the actual story, is a public policy that “regulates adult marijuana use, but restricts its use among young people, via licensing regulations for sellers and the enforcement of age restrictions for consumers, best reduces the threats associated with the plant’s use or abuse by adolescents.”
DDUUUUHHHHHHH
Steve: When most people hear hoof beats they think horses – not zebras. Yet your comments are always covered in stripes. Nice try, but no banana.
Will sending them to prison to be beaten, raped and infected with aids improve graduation rates?
Not saying right or wrong but the Lancet is a very political med journal. Wait until at least ten other med journals validate the results with independent research and at that point possibly there is something
to really be concerned about.
Modern med research is on a par with the (political) science journals espousing global warming.