A recent study has confirmed that marijuana is the substance of choice among college teenagers, replacing what used to be cigarettes. Just below 6% of full-time students tested by researchers at the University of Michigan for the yearly “Monitoring the Future” study admitted to using cannabis either at least twenty times in the last month. In contradistinction, 5% of those subjects identified themselves as avid cigarette smokers. This is a huge fall from the 19% who smoked daily in 1999.
“The findings suggest that teenagers and young adults have absorbed public health warnings about the dangers of cigarettes but increasingly regard marijuana as benign or carrying few risks,” Lloyd Johnston, lead investigator, said. “It’s clear that for the past seven or eight years there has been an increase in marijuana use among the nation’s college students,” Johnston said. “And this largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high school seniors.”
The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research has analyzed a sample that represents full-time college students’ drug and alcohol use annually since 1980. The percentage of avid marijuana smokers from the 2014 survey was the largest ever recorded. Furthermore, it was noted the first time that recreational weed exceeded avid cigarette use. Out of that sample data, 21% percent of the college students claimed that they had used pot at least one time in the last 30 days, while 34% said they used it in the last year.
The results also highlighted that less students are abusing alcohol. Only 5% of students surveyed claimed to have had engaged in extreme binge drinking. This was “defined by the researchers as having had 15 or more drinks in a row at least once in the previous two weeks.” The amount of students claiming to have had used cocaine in the last year rose from 2.7% in 2013 to 4.4% in 2014. Johnston addressed the spike and called it significant, but said that it was too soon to know whether or not cocaine was becoming popular among colleges again. However, parents should not worry about sending their kids to colleges because according to Johnson, more than half of the students reported that they did not use any illicit drugs in the last year.
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