Teen Marijuana Use Steady as Kids See Less Risk in Pot

December 20, 2013 Leave a comment

Teen Marijuana Use Steady as Kids See Less Risk in Pot

About 6.5 percent of high school seniors smoked marijuana daily in 2013, compared with 6 percent in 2003, as attitudes toward the drug’s danger relax, according to a U.S. government report. About 40 percent of 12th-graders view regular marijuana use as harmful, a decrease from 44.1 percent last year, according to a Monitoring the Future report from the National Institutes of Health. As more states ease marijuana laws, the change in attitudes may increase future use, the authors said.Pot remained the most popular illicit drug, and one-third of high school seniors reported smoking it in the last year. The percentage of adolescents who reported using cigarettes, alcohol, Ecstasy, inhalants, synthetic cannabinoids, bath salts, and the painkiller Vicodin declined this year. Cocaine and heroin use didn’t change significantly, though both drugs are “at historic lows,” according to a statement from the NIH.

“As the attitudes toward use soften, we tend to see the rates of marijuana use go up,” said Wilson Compton, the deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a telephone interview. “We’re much less concerned about the use in adults than the use in children.”

Last year, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize the recreational use and sale of cannabis for those 21 and older. Medical marijuana is legal in 20 U.S. states including California. To track how these legal changes may affect teenagers, the drug abuse institute has given out eight grants to get investigators into the field quickly, Compton said.

Prescription Access

In 2012, the survey added questions about where teenagers get marijuana. Using data from 2012 and 2013, the investigators found that one-third of the 12th-graders using pot obtained the drug with someone else’s prescription. Another 6 percent of teens got it using their own prescription.

“That teaches us that policy changes will lead to changes in availability,” Compton said. “I’d like to see data for several years before we understand all the implications.”

The study also looked at alcohol, showing that 22 percent of high school seniors engaged in binge drinking two weeks before the survey, a slight decrease from last year’s study. Binge drinking was defined as having five or more drinks in a row. Total alcohol use continued to decline, with 40 percent reporting use within a month of the survey from its peak of more than half of teenagers reporting use in 1997.

More than 41,000 students from almost 400 public schools completed the Monitoring the Future survey. The study began in 1975 by asking questions of high school seniors. In 1991, it included younger students as well.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Lopatto in San Francisco at elopatto@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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