Although there is much more legal cannabis available in the United States than there was, say, ten years ago, adolescents have discovered that finding marijuana is much harder than it used to be. That is undoubtedly beneficial for the country as well as the push for legalization. There are very large-scale statistics and show just a slight reduction in how much marijuana is available to those younger than eighteen.
Although slight, this is still a change in the right direction. The data is from one of the most known surveys on drug use in the United States, and change in such data has had significant impacts in the past. The Monitoring the Future Survey has been studying high school students and drug use for the last forty-one years.
Here is the data: in 1975, 87.8% of high school seniors found cannabis fairly easy or extremely easy to get. In 1985 and 1995, 88.5% of high school seniors had the same answer, and in 2005, the result was 85.6%. So much for making the drug illegal to keep it away from the youth of the country.
In many ways, just these statistics reveal the truth of America’s drug control policies when it comes to cannabis: there is no control. Yet the era of legalization began, which had two very important characteristics. The first characteristic is that thanks to both medical and recreational marijuana laws, cannabis has become legally available.
The second characteristic, which concerns laws for legalization and actual access to the drug, is the assumed risk of using cannabis began to decline. Perceived risk is a humorous measure, humorous which is used as “illogical and irrational.” This data indicate that when more people began using marijuana, perceived risk dropped, letting antagonists of legalization assert that any changes in the law will lead to a higher rate of adolescent usage; obviously, this data proves the opposite.
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