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The future of marijuana legalization
Here’s what you need to know about the future of marijuana legalization in the United States, from its racist beginnings to today.
Just the FAQ, TODAY
Melissa Agard: “The use of marijuana by juveniles has decreased in states that are fully legalized.”
PolitiFact’s ruling: Half true
This is why: Wisconsin Republican lawmakers may have made it clear that Tony Evers’s plans to legalize marijuana in the next state budget will go up in smoke, but Sen. Melissa Agard, D-Madison, is not backing down.
Agard urged the state for years to legalize the drug for medicinal and recreational purposes, a proposal that received little traction under former Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature.
Today, however, the dynamics are different. Legalization could generate $ 166 million in revenue that could help fund rural schools and programs for communities disproportionately affected by marijuana laws, Evers said when announcing the plan.
Wisconsin is one of only 14 states that have not legalized marijuana in any form. Fifteen states have legalized recreational marijuana over the past few years, including the surrounding Illinois and Michigan, and Minnesota lawmakers have introduced a bill that would do the same.
Public support for the idea is also increasing in Wisconsin. A 2019 Marquette University Law School poll found 59% of Wisconsin voters support legalization for recreational purposes, and 83% support it for medicinal purposes.
Yet Republican leaders of the Legislature’s budget committee wasted little time to shoot down the proposal. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, said he believed it was “too big” to be included in the state budget, but Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, was concerned about the health effects of the drug on children who prefers to use it. .
We judge Kapenga’s allegation linking marijuana use and psychological disorders to be true. But Agard jumped in to make another point:
“The use of marijuana by the youth has actually decreased in states that are fully legalized,” she tweeted back.
This is an important claim because those who oppose legalization often claim that the move will cause a dramatic increase in the smoking of teens. But is that correct?
Let’s see.
More: Efforts to expand the legal use of marijuana in Texas will appear in the upcoming legislative session. This is our number 8 edition.
According to study, legalization may cause decline, but the results are not as definitive as Agard claims
Along with her statement, Agard tweeted a link to an analysis of marijuana laws and the use of the drug against teens by JAMA Pediatrics, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Medical Association.
The analysis, published on July 8, 2019, compiled the data from the survey of youth risk behaviors of each state from 1993 to 2017 to examine the link between legalization and marijuana use of marijuana.
According to surveys of seven states that approved marijuana laws for recreation from 2012 to 2017 – Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada and Washington, researchers found that the likelihood of marijuana use and a decrease of 8 % in youth decreases by 9%. the likelihood of regular use of marijuana among the youth after such laws were passed.
“We interpreted our results as consistent with the argument that it is more difficult for teens to obtain marijuana, as drug dealers are being replaced by licensed pharmacies that require proof of age,” said author D. Mark Anderson, an associate professor in economics at the Montana States, studied. University, PolitiFact said in an email to Wisconsin.
In some states, recreational sales only started a few years after legalization, and the researchers repeated their analysis based on the dates and got similar results, Anderson said.
A bias of the analysis is that it uses an average – and when looking at states’ raw data from the survey, the results are more mixed.
In Colorado, for example, there have been no significant changes in marijuana use among high school students since 2005, according to data from the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey. In 2013, a year after the state legalized the drug, 19.7% of high school students had used marijuana in the past 30 days; in 2019 had 20.6%.
More: Advocates for marijuana want to ‘move the ball forward’ in Texas legislature
Alaska’s state survey has also reported no significant changes in current marijuana use since the drug was legalized in 2015 and sales began in 2016.
And in Oregon, which was legalized in 2014, current marijuana use fell among the 8th graders after recreational sales began, but it increased among the 11th graders, data from the state’s youth survey in 2017 found. In the 2019 survey, marijuana use increased among 8-year-olds but below 11-degrees.
It is also important to note that the survey of youth risk behavior is only one type of study. Although one set of data from the state of Washington, from the Washington Healthy Youth Survey, found that the use of marijuana in the state did decrease among the 8th and 10th pupils of the state after legalization for recreational purposes in 2012, other studies conducted in the JAMA analysis was quoted, not the same conclusion.
For example, a study using data from the Monitoring the Future survey, which assesses drug and alcohol use among teens across the U.S., found a statistically significant increase in marijuana use among 10 students in Washington after legalization for recreational use.
Some believe that Monitoring the Future data has too much volatility from year to year to include changes in marijuana policies, but it is clear that more revision will be needed to fully address the effects of marijuana laws on recreation on youth use understand.
The full consequences of legalizing marijuana will only be seen a generation after national legalization, which has not yet happened, said Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and former co-director of RAND’s research center for drug policy, told PolitiFact. Illinois on a similar claim from a representative of the State of Illinois.
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Agard said the use of marijuana for marijuana has declined in countries that have fully legalized the drug for medicinal and recreational purposes.
The JAMA analysis she cited did prove this, although it has a caveat – looking at the data of individual states, some who legalized the drug years ago did not see any significant change in youth use .
Meanwhile, at least one study found the opposite – an increase in use. Experts believe it will take many years before Agard claims it can be said with certainty.
We judge her claim Half True.
Sources
Email Exchange, Senator Melissa Agard’s Office
Email Exchange, D. Mark Anderson, Associate Professor at Montana State University
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Democratic Legislature Introduces Legislative Spot Bill,” April 13, 2015
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Governor Tony Evers Will Propose to Legalize Legal and Medical Marijuana as Part of the Next State Budget,” February 7, 2021
Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Recreational Marijuana Account Back at Minnesota Capitol,” February 2, 2021
JAMA Pediatrics, Association of Marijuana Laws Using Marijuana-Marijuana: New Estimates from Youth Risk Surveys, July 8, 2019
JAMA Pediatrics, the prevalence of cannabis use among juveniles after legalization in Washington state, December 19, 2018
JAMA Pediatrics, Association of State Recreational Marijuana Laws with Adolescent Marijuana Use, February 2017
National Institute on Drug Abuse, Monitoring the Future, accessed 24 February 2021
Prevention Science, Has Cannabis Use Increased Among Adolescents Following Changes in Legal Status? A Commentary on the Use of Future Monitoring for Analyzing Changes in State Cannabis Laws, December 2, 2019
Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, the prevalence of the past 30 days of substance abuse among high school students, Colorado 2005 to 2019, consulted on February 24, 2021
Alaska Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2017 and 2019 Highlights, accessed February 24, 2021