Elsevier

Drug and Alcohol Dependence

Volume 169, 1 December 2016, Pages 5-10
Drug and Alcohol Dependence

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Changing perspectives on marijuana use during early adolescence and young adulthood: Evidence from a panel of cross-sectional surveys

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2016.09.026Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examine marijuana-related differences across adolescence and young adulthood.

  • Significant differences found between youth born in late-1980s and mid-1990s.

  • The link between marijuana disapproval and use found to be invariant.

Abstract

Introduction

Prior research has often overlooked potential cohort differences in marijuana views and use across adolescence and young adulthood. To begin to address this gap, we conduct an exploratory examination of marijuana views and use among American youth using a panel of cross-sectional surveys.

Method

Findings are based on repeated, cross-sectional data collected annually from adolescents (ages 12–17; n = 230,452) and young adults (ages 18–21; n = 120,588) surveyed as part of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2002 and 2014. For each of the birth years between 1986 and 1996, we combined a series of nationally representative cross-sections to provide multi-year data strings designed to approximate nationally representative cohorts.

Results

Compared to youth born in the mid-to-late 1980s, youth born in the mid-1990s reported significantly higher levels of marijuana disapproval during the early adolescent years (Age 14: 1988 = 64.7%, 1994 = 70.4%) but lower levels of disapproval during the young adult years (Age 19: 1988 = 32.0%, 1994 = 25.0%; Age 20: 1988 = 27.9%, 1994 = 19.7%). Moreover, the prevalence of marijuana use among youth born in 1994 was significantly lower—compared to youth born in 1988—at age 14 (1988: 11.39%, 1994: 8.19%) and significantly higher at age 18 (1988: 29.67%, 1994: 34.83%). This pattern held even when adjusting for potential confounding by demographic changes in the population across the study period.

Conclusions

We see evidence of changes in the perceptions of marijuana use among youth born during the late twentieth century.

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed tremendous change with respect to the perception and distribution of marijuana in the United States (US). In 1996, California became the first state to legalize the use of medical marijuana and, shortly thereafter, calls were made by The New England Journal of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health for research to reassess the classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug (Kassirer, 1997, Voelker, 1997). By 2008, more than a dozen states had legalized the use of marijuana for specific medical conditions and voters in Massachusetts approved an initiative to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana (Lee, 2012). At present, twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws, recreational marijuana use is legal in several states, and more than half of all American adults support legalization (Model, 2015).

A bevy of recent studies have examined changes in the use and perception of marijuana among youth in the US. Trend studies conducted using data from the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), and Monitoring the Future (MTF) point to noteworthy changes in marijuana use among adolescents and young adults over the past few decades (Hasin et al., 2015a, Hasin et al., 2015b, Johnson et al., 2015, Johnston et al., 2015, Salas-Wright et al., 2015, Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration, 2014). For instance, evidence from the NSDUH and MTF point to decreases in marijuana use among adolescents along with modest but significant increases in use and substantial decreases in disapproval among young adults (Johnston et al., 2015, Salas-Wright et al., 2015).

One important shortcoming, however, faced by all the aforementioned trend studies is a failure to account for cohort differences. For instance, Salas-Wright et al. (2015) provide a fine-grained assessment of trends in marijuana use and disapproval among developmental subgroups (i.e., ages 12–14, 15–17, 18–25). While such an assessment provides insight into changes in prevalence among youth in particular developmental subsets, this approach overlooks the ways in which youth from particular cohorts may differ across the spectrum of adolescence and young adulthood (Keyes et al., 2011). Indeed, given the speed at which changes in marijuana policy have occurred—particularly during the latter half of the 2000s—it is reasonable to surmise that children who entered adolescence, for example, in the 1990s may be distinct from those who became teenagers in the mid-2000s.

Our objective is to extend findings from recent trend studies by examining the disapproval and use of marijuana using a panel of cross-sectional surveys. Specifically, we construct a series of analytic samples designed to approximate nationally representative cohorts of American youth from early adolescence to young adulthood. Notably, while our approach allows us examine marijuana-related trends using strings of data that are analogous to cohorts, we should be very clear that it is not possible to examine true cohorts using NSDUH data. Cognizant of this limitation, we conduct an exploratory study designed to examine changes in the prevalence of marijuana disapproval and use among American youth born between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s.

Section snippets

Sample and procedures

Study findings are based on repeated, cross-sectional data collected annually as part of the NSDUH between 2002 and 2014. Each year the NSDUH provides estimates of substance use in the civilian, non-institutionalized population of the US on the basis of a new, non-overlapping national sample. Since 2002, a total of 723,283 respondents (including 230,452 adolescents and 120,588 young adults) have completed the NSDUH survey. The NSDUH design/methods are summarized briefly here; however, a

Marijuana disapproval

Among all birth years/strings of data, we observed a clear reduction in the proportion of youth reporting “strong disapproval” of marijuana use as youth progressed from the early adolescent to young adult stage (see Table 1). However, closer inspection reveals important differences between youth born in 1988 and those born in 1994 (see Fig. 1). Specifically, we see a pattern in which youth born in 1994 report significantly greater disapproval at age 14 (70.39, 95% CI = 67.9–72.8) as compared to

Discussion

We found that youth born in the mid-1990s—that is, those entering the teenage years in the latter half of the 2000s—appear to be distinct from those born in the mid-to-late 1980s with respect to the disapproval of marijuana use. In particular, we saw a pattern in which youth from earlier birth years reported relatively greater disapproval during early-to-mid adolescence in combination with increasingly lower disapproval during young adulthood.

This curious pattern of results begs the question:

Conflict of interest

No conflict declared

Contributors

Dr. Salas-Wright lead all writing and statistical analyses. Dr. Vaughn contributed to the study conceptualization as well as the writing of the entire manuscript. Dr. Perron provided critical support to the statistical analyses, tables/figures, and methodology section. Dr. Reingle Gonzalez and Dr. Clark Goings contributed to the writing of the introduction and discussion sections, respectively. All authors have read and approve of the submission of this manuscript to Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Role of funding source

This research was supported in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health (R25 DA030310; PI: James C. Anthony).

Contributors

No disclosures to be made.

Acknowledgements

None.

References (17)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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