In a newly published study, high school students from Canada reported that their perception of marijuana being easy to get has decreased in recent years. This was during the period when the country legalized adult cannabis and opened retail stores across the country.
The six-person team that wrote the article, which was published in Archives of Public Health this month, noted that despite a growing literature on marijuana use by adults since the national legalization of the drug in 2018, “there appears to have been a paucity of studies dedicated to the examination of changes in youth perceptions of the availability of cannabis over the same time period.”
Researchers analyzed responses to three questions: 2018-19; 2019-20; and 2020-21. Researchers looked at responses to two questions, “Do you believe it would be easy or difficult for you to obtain marijuana if you desired some?” and “How often have you used marijuana or cannabis in the past 12 months?”
In that period, the number of students who reported that marijuana was easily accessible dropped from 51 percent to 37.4 per cent – a drop of over a quarter (26.7%). Researchers noted that “students with cannabis use were more likely to say access was easy.”
Since legalization, and during the initial and ongoing pandemic response period, youth have shown a decline in perceptions that cannabis is easily accessible.
The study defined current cannabis use as usage within the last month. This also decreased during the study period. It went from 12.7% in 2018-19 down to 7.5 % in 2020-21. Retail sales of marijuana increased across the country.
When comparing cohorts of students over time, those who had used marijuana were more likely than others to report that cannabis was easier to access as they aged. The study found that perceived ease of access to cannabis was “slightly hindered” during the first pandemic, but increased as the pandemic continued.
The report concluded that “while the prevalence of youth reporting cannabis as easy to obtain has declined over the years, and during the early and ongoing pandemic period,” “the likelihood that underage youth will report cannabis as easy to acquire increases with age and progression through high school.”
It adds that “given that over a third (35%) of respondents to the latest wave of COMPASS data said that cannabis was easily accessible,” there is a lot of room for further cannabis control efforts to make an impact.
The authors said that the decline in perceived availability of marijuana over time “aligns with evidence from U.S. youth showing that perceptions about cannabis being easily accessible have been declining (2002 to 2015).
Since the beginning of legalization, and during the early and ongoing pandemic period, the number of youth under the age of 18 who reported that it would be easy to get cannabis has decreased.
The researchers added that the data “appears to be tangentially in line with representative data from 7 quarters of the National Cannabis Survey” (NCS), “showing a decline in the use of illegally sourced marijuana among Canadians between the pre- and post-legalization period (51,7% to 40% respectively).
They did not attribute the drop in availability observed to the age restrictions in Canada’s cannabis law or the decline in the illicit marijuana market. Instead, they noted that other factors such as the pandemic and the legalization of marijuana could have been involved.
They wrote that “while this may be an indication that components of Cannabis Act are effectively restricting the availability of marijuana to underage youth,” “we are unable if we have been affected by the onset COVID-19 Pandemic restrictions which limited the socialization opportunities for peer networks given that peers are one of the main sources of underage youth obtaining cannabis.”
The authors noted that their findings, which showed that the reported ease of access of marijuana to teens increased as they aged, were “not unexpected,” given that “the risk of cannabis usage often increases with age and that few youth cannabis users stop using cannabis during their high-school years and that evidence from emerging adults or adults…shows that use of cannabis usually increases during the early stages of the pandemic.”
The study also suggests that future cannabis control efforts should prioritize youth-focused interventions tailored to different age groups, and tailored to those who have or have not used cannabis before. It notes that there is “no significant differences in perceptions of accessibility between males and women.”
The study was written by four researchers: three from the University of Waterloo School of Public Health Sciences; one from Universite Laval, Quebec City; one from Brock University’s Department of Health Sciences; and one from Public Health Agency of Canada’s Applied Research Division.
In the U.S. earlier this month, a federal official stated that the use of marijuana by teens has not increased , “despite the proliferation of state legalization across the country.”
Marsha Lopez, head of NIDA’s Epidemiological Research Branch, responded to Marijuana Moment in a recent webinar that there had been no significant increases. “In fact they haven’t reported an increase in perceived accessibility either, which is sort of interesting.”
According to these data, “Whatever is happening in the country with [legalization of] adult use hasn’t really affected the younger people,” she said.
A new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that rates for current and lifetime cannabis usage among high school students continue to decline amid the legalization campaign.
It was noted that the use of marijuana by high school students increased from 2009 to 2013, before legal dispensaries opened, but has fallen since then. Voters approved the first recreational legalization laws in 2012. Retail sales began in 2014.
In a study published last month of high school students from Massachusetts, it was found that youth were not more likely to smoke marijuana in the state after its legalization. However, more students believed that their parents smoked cannabis after this policy change.
The American Journal of Preventive Medicine published a separate study last year that was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which found that the state-level legalization of cannabis is not associated with an increase in youth use.
The study showed that “youths who spent a greater portion of their adolescence in legalization were not more or less likely than adolescents who did not spend much time under legalization to have used marijuana at 15 years old.”
Another federally-funded study by researchers at Michigan State University , published in PLOS One in 2013 found that cannabis retail sales could be followed in some states by an increase in cannabis onsets among older adults. However, this was not the case for those under the age of 18 who are prohibited from buying cannabis products.
The trend is being observed even though adult marijuana use and certain psychedelics will reach “historic highs” by 2022. Separate data released earlier in the year confirms this.
In a Gallup survey, it was found that more than half of American adults had tried marijuana in the past, and that cannabis consumption rates were higher than tobacco. According to a Gallup poll, 29 percent of people aged 18-34 smoke marijuana. However, this is not representative of cannabis consumption as the survey asked only about smoking, not edibles, tinctures, or vaping.
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