Wash U study finds no increase in youth marijuana use in states with reduced penalties

Washington University recently surveyed teenagers grade 8-12 in states with both decriminalized cannabis and criminal possession for cannabis to help answer the question many are concerned with, does decriminalizing cannabis increase consumption in youth? 23% of teenagers in decriminalized states said they had consumed cannabis within the last month and around the same percent of teens gave the same answers in states without decriminalized cannabis. Researchers show that the minor differences were not significant to the statistic and the decriminalization laws are helping communities by dropping arrest rates for cannabis possession by 75%,

“The policies that the states adopted were very homogeneous, so we got a chance to look at the same kind of natural expe+riment five times over,” Grucza said. “In each of those five cases, we saw that the policy did what it was intended to do, which was reduce involvement of marijuana users with the criminal justice system."