Oregon State University researchers find more college students using marijuana since legalization
The Register-Guard 15 June 2017
Family First Comment: No surprises in this research!!
“Researchers also found that more students at the Oregon university under age 21 are using marijuana than students over age 21, Kerr said. The legal age to buy and use recreational pot in Oregon is 21. “This was a big surprise to us because legalization of use is actually having an impact on illegal use,” OSU professor Harold Bae said in a statement. Kerr said having an increased supply of marijuana might be leading to more use by students who are under the legal age. He noted that many of them are already taking part in underage drinking, and students often obtain alcohol from older, legal-aged peers. So the same might be true for pot, he said. “It also might be that there’s generally some liberalization of the attitudes about marijuana, and so people who are younger are seeing it more and thinking it’s more common than it is and that’s influencing them,” Kerr said. “But we don’t really know, so we need to understand that better in future research.”
The TOP policy (Gareth Morgan’s party) tries to argue this won’t happen. But it has. And it will in NZ!
College students at an undisclosed large public university in Oregon are using more marijuana since recreational pot became legal two years ago, according to a new Oregon State University study. The increased use is mainly by students who are binge alcohol drinkers and by students who are under the legal pot consumption age of 21, the study found.
Comparing marijuana use by college students before and after Oregon’s legalization of recreational marijuana in July 2015, OSU researchers also found increases at six out of seven universities around the country. But the unnamed Oregon university rose above the others with the highest increase, led by students who also binge drink.
“We found that, overall, rates of marijuana use have increased across most schools and across the country likely, but that the rates in Oregon increased more,” OSU professor David Kerr said Wednesday.
The journal Addiction published the 25-page OSU study Wednesday. Researchers also kept the other six universities anonymous, saying only that the schools are in states where recreational marijuana is still illegal. Data for the study came from 10,924 undergraduate students ages 18 to 26, according to the study.
The OSU researchers crunched existing data, previously collected by the University of Michigan. College students around the country filled out surveys as part of Michigan’s Healthy Minds Study, giving information about substance abuse and mental health.
Kerr said he and his fellow OSU researchers focused on the one Oregon university and six others around the country because Michigan happened to have data from those universities’ students before and after Oregon’s legalization of marijuana.
READ MORE: http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/35676552-75/oregon-state-university-researchers-find-more-college-students-using-marijuana-since-legalization.html.csp
