Teen Pot Smoking ‘Surges’ While Staying the Same
According to the latest
Partnership Attitude Tracking Survey, the percentage of high
school students who said they had ever tried marijuana fell between
2010 and 2011, the percentage reporting past-year use remained the
same, and the percentage reporting past-month use rose slightly.
But that is not what the press release from
the Partnership at Drugfree.org (formerly the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America) said. The organization, which sponsors the
survey together with the MetLife Foundation, led with this instead:
“National Study: Teen ‘Heavy’ Marijuana Use Up 80 Percent Since
2008, One in Ten Teens Reports Using Marijuana at Least 20 Times a
Month.”
Sexier, right? News outlets sure thought so:
Report:
Frequent marijuana smoking up 80 percent
among teens
Study: Teen marijuana use on the rise
More Teens
Smoking Marijuana, Survey Says
And so on. Those summaries definitely sound more alarming than,
say, “Marijuana Use Among Teenagers Remains Essentially Unchanged.”
But they’re not quite as—what’s the word?—true. The increase hyped
by the Partnership happened almost entirely between 2008 and 2009.
Since then the numbers have been basically flat. Furthermore, the
numbers recorded last year are virtually indistinguishable from the
numbers recorded in 1998, the earliest year for which the new
report includes data.
Data from the Monitoring
the Future Study, which is conducted by University of Michigan
researchers under contract with the National Institute on Drug
Abuse, show a similar pattern: Marijuana use rates are essentially
the same now as they were in the late 1990s. In between, they went
down and up for reasons that remain unclear but that probably have
little to do with
anti-drug ads,
medical marijuana laws, the number of pot
busts, or the federal government’s drug control “strategy.”
One notable difference between the Partnership Attitude Tracking
Survey (PATS) and the Monitoring the Future (MTF) Study: The PATS
numbers tend to be higher, especially for “heavy” marijuana
use—meaning use on 20 or more days in the previous month, which MTF
calls “daily” use. While PATS put “heavy” use at 9 percent of all
high school students last year, MTF put it at less than 7 percent
for seniors, who are more likely to smoke pot than younger students
are. Averaging seniors with 10th-graders, the MTF number is about 5
percent, meaning the PATS number is nearly twice as high. Since the
sampled populations are supposed to be about the same, maybe PATS
is eliciting more candor—or more exaggeration.
Speaking of which, “daily” marijuana use by high school seniors
in the MTF survey peaked
at nearly 11 percent in 1978. As I noted
in a 1993 Reason article about marijuana reform, such
figures should be taken with a grain of salt:
These numbers overstate the percentage of seniors who got stoned
every day in the late ’70s. First of all, they don’t represent
actual daily use throughout the year–only use on 20 or more of the
previous 30 days. Granted, that’s still pretty heavy. But the
numbers include kids who had recently gone through a brief period
of heavy use. And as Mark Kleiman, associate professor of public
policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, notes
in Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of
Control, the data are probably inflated by error or
exaggeration: Experience with marketing surveys indicates that
questions about habitual activities like “On how many of the last
30 days did you use marijuana?” tend to elicit systematic
overreporting. Furthermore, the 11-percent “daily use” figure
appears to be inconsistent with information from NlDA’s household
survey.
In any event, the corresponding PATS number, contrary to the
impression given by the Partnership’s press release and the stories
it generated, did not go up in the most recent survey.