4 Troubled Teens Blog

More teenagers are smoking marijuana even as they are cutting down on smoking cigarettes, binge drinking, and using methamphetamine, according to a new study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Because of the national debate on whether to legalize marijuana for medical uses, more teenagers believe it is safe. Many of today's teenagers also believe that prescription drugs, Ecstasy and LSD are safe to use, which means more teens will experiment with these in the future.

• Only 44.8 percent of today's eighth-graders believe that smoking marijuana poses "a great risk" compared to 48 percent last year.
• Over 20 percent of high school seniors said they had smoked marijuana in the past month.

"When the perception of the danger goes down, in the following years you will see an increasing use," said Nora Volkow, director of the NIDA. She noted that prescription drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin are very addictive and can act as gateways to heroin, which is cheaper.

The survey found that the use of prescription narcotics rose among this year's 10th graders:

• 8 percent said they had used Vicodin in the past 12 months, compared to 6.7 percent last year.
  
• For OxyContin, those figures were 3.6 last year and 5.1 percent this year.
  
• About 44 percent said they had taken at least one alcoholic drink in the past month, which shows little change from last year.
  
• Recreational use of Ritalin, a drug prescribed for Attention Deficit Disorder, is slightly down.

This studywas performed by researchers from the University of Michigan, who collected data on 47,097 students.

Labels: prescription_drug_abuse, marijuana

Posted By: Aspen/CRC