Alcohol use is also more widespread, so that's another point. But alcohol use, not psychotropics, is associated with violent behavior and impulse-taking actions like reckless driving.
...from the findings of the 2011 “Monitoring the Future,” an annual study of self-reported use of various licit and illicit substances by 47,000 junior high and high school students in the US. All use of substances tracked in this report are down, except for marijuana. But alcohol and tobacco use are at historic lows.
But if you think that this overall decline in teen drug use would provide prohibitionists or the mainstream media with a reason to celebrate, think again. Here’s a sampling of the headlines that greeted the study’s release: “Marijuana Use Growing Among Teenagers” (The New York Times); “Marijuana Use Among Teens at Highest Level in 30 Years” (The Los Angeles Weekly); “Why Teens Need to Know Risks of Marijuana” (from the editorial board of The Christian Science Monitor). Also weighing in was the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which publicly called the report’s findings “depressing.”
By contrast, the year-to-year data presented in the actual study was far less sensational. “Marijuana use continued to rise among 10th and 12th graders this year for all prevalence periods (lifetime, past year, past 30 days, and daily use in the past 30 days),” the authors noted in a press release, before adding an important caveat: “No one of these changes was large enough to be statistically significant, but they all continue the pattern of a gradual rise...for the fourth straight year – a sharp contrast to the considerable decline that had occurred in the preceding decade.”
Predictably, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske blamed this four-year “gradual rise” – highlighted by the finding that a greater percentage of high school seniors (6.6 percent) now report consuming cannabis daily than at any time since the 1980s – on anything but the problematic prohibitionist policies that he favors. “The federal drug czar said he believed the increasing prevalence of medicinal marijuana was a factor in the uptick,” reported the Times. Kerlikowske himself added: “These last couple years, the amount of attention that’s been given to medical marijuana has been huge. And when I’ve done focus groups with high school students in states where medical marijuana is legal, they say, ‘Well, if it’s called medicine and it’s given to patients by caregivers, then that’s really the wrong message for us as high school students.’”
Of course, if Kerlikowske’s allegations were to hold any weight whatsoever, the self-reported spike in teen use would have started nearly a decade earlier, when the nationwide public debate over medical pot began in earnest. Of the 16 states that have passed medical cannabis laws, 10 did so between 1996 and 2006, a period of time when adolescents’ year-by-year pot use fell dramatically. In fact, since 2008, only two states – Michigan in 2008 and Arizona in 2010 – have even enacted medical cannabis laws. (Similar laws passed in Delaware, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have yet to be implemented.)
The authors are correct that teens’ views regarding the “perceived risk” of cannabis use has diminished in recent years. Since 2008, the percentage of high school seniors who believe that a “great risk” is associated with cannabis use dropped from an estimated 50 percent to just below 45 percent. However, this downward trend actually began in the early 1990s, when some 80 percent of seniors perceived such a risk – and, curiously, even as the “perceived risk” among teens declined in the 1990s and throughout most of 2000, adolescent rates of marijuana use also fell, raising doubts as to the credibility of the investigators’ theory.
http://www.hightimes.com/read/teenagers-wise
Current usage seems to indicate that education does help teens to make better decisions. As they have learned of the relative safety of one thing versus another - usage has shifted.
But, as the author at High Times, and just about everyone I've read who has written about this issue notes - there is a good reason for public service campaigns to educate teenagers that there is risk associated with usage for some within their age cohort - for those with family histories of schizo-affective disorders and for those who begin use very early. For this last issue, however, I would think it would be important to look at the family dynamics in which such a child must survive to gain a wider view of drug use at such an early age.
On the other hand, there are valid health and medical reasons to allow doctors to prescribe marijuana-based medicines for the treatment of things like epilepsy and side issues of autism, etc. In such cases, again a "zero-tolerance" policy for children doesn't make sense when controlled, medical usage can positively impact a child's ability to function, learn and survive.
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