According to a recent study by the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, pot use is increasing among American teenagers, while drinking is on the wane. This is apparently bad news, at least according to a group calling itself the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA), which given that it's anti-drug, doesn't exactly sound like an unbiased, impartial observer here.
Not that anyone at the Weekly would argue that drugs that don't rhyme with Tijuana are really great or anything, but why so negative, CADCA? After all, despite the fact that pot smoking among high school seniors is higher than at any time since the early 1980s, alcohol use among that same group has gone down from 43.5 percent to 41.2 percent. Binge drinking, meanwhile, went down from 25.2 percent to 23.2 percent.
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Speaking of numbers, guess
what percentage of high school seniors smokes weed daily: not 40
percent, not 25 percent, not even 10 percent. Just 6.1 percent. That's
less than the percentage (8) that regularly uses Vicodin, which, like
alcohol–but not marijuana–is highly addictive.
CADCA apparently believes this is progress, but another way of reading the numbers suggests that half of all high school seniors (none of whom are allowed to drink legally) are regular consumers of alcohol, and roughly one quarter of them are well on their way to becoming alcoholics.
For more details on the study, you can click here.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).