Legalizing Medical Marijuana Doesn't Influence Youth Use

One of the most over used anti-marijuana arguments is "think of the children" or "kids will start using marijuana even younger" but it seems the more states that develope marijuana laws, the more studies find that these hypothetical problems simply don't exist. While some states with medical marijuana laws do have larger percentages of youth using marijuana, it turns out that elevated use of marijuana was present in the state before marijuana legislation existed. No major US national data set supports that marijuana laws increase youth marijuana use. 

“While states with MML (medical marijuana laws) feature higher rates of adolescent marijuana use, to date, no major U.S. national data set, including the NSDUH (US National Survey on Drug Use in Households), supports that MML are a cause of these higher use levels,” investigators concluded. “[W]hen within-state changes are properly considered and pre-MML prevalence is properly controlled, there is no evidence of a differential increase in past-month marijuana use in youth that can be attributed to state medical marijuana laws.”