When I was growing up—back in the dark ages before the Internet and cell phones and social media—smoking marijuana was still pretty taboo. Sure, there were kids in my high school that did it. That was no secret. But they also got labeled potheads and stoners, which, as you might guess, weren’t the kind of labels most of us wanted draped around our necks. Despite Cheech and Chong making a joke out of smoking weed in the ’80s, it still wasn’t something “good kids” did. Getting caught with marijuana was much more serious—and embarrassing—than “just” getting caught drinking alcohol.
Fast-forward three decades, and the times, well, they are a changin’. Attitudes toward a drug that was once considered dangerous and taboo have morphed into something akin to a cultural shrug. No big deal, many people say. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear the argument that marijuana is actually less dangerous and destructive in some ways than alcohol.
Evidence of the cultural sea change regarding marijuana is most evident in the fact that Colorado and Washington state legalized the drug by popular referendum in 2013 … and the federal government shrugged as well, instead of enforcing national laws against the stuff. Meanwhile, 18 other states and the District of Columbia have approved marijuana for medical use, and several other states are considering legalizing it as well.
But some experts are also beginning to sound the alarm regarding the costs and risks associated with more lenient pot laws. Even as cultural attitudes change, these voices note that marijuana is worthy of caution for some pretty good reasons
Marijuana advocates’ frequently claim that the drug is benign. But a significant body of research suggests that pot is especially problematic for adolescent development, in part because the teen brain is growing and changing so rapidly. Studies indicate that teens who use marijuana once a week or more have trouble with their memories coupled with a degradation in their problem-solving skills. Young pot users’ grade point averages are a full point lower than their non-using peers. IQ tends to sink, too. “We found that people who began using marijuana in their teenage years and then continued to use marijuana for many years lost about eight IQ points from childhood to adulthood,” says Madeline Meier, author of a recent marijuana study conducted by Duke University.
Meanwhile, analysis of data from the Monitoring the Future survey recently published in the International Journal of Drug Policy suggests that teens who’ve never tried the drug before are more likely to do so if marijuana is legalized. Specifically, researchers found that 5.6% of low-risk high school seniors—those who’ve never used pot, have a strong ethical background and don’t have marijuana-using friends—would try the drug if it was legal.
With regard to how much teens are already smoking pot, a national survey of more than 40,000 high school kids conducted by the University of Michigan reinforces the notion that young people today are laissez faire when it comes to marijuana. The survey said that one in four high school seniors reported smoking the drug in the month prior to the survey, with 36% reporting use in the previous year. Only 40% of those high schoolers see pot smoking as risky, a figure that’s down from 44% in 2013 and 75% nearly two decades ago. “Young people are getting the wrong message from the medical marijuana and legalization campaigns,” says Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “If it’s continued to be talked about as a benign substance that has no ill effects, we’re doing a great disservice to young people by giving them that message.”
Among those ill effects? Fatal crashes involving drivers under the influence of weed have tripled in the last decade, according to a new report from researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana,” said study co-author Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia.
Those are some of the things we know about marijuana. But then there are the things we don’t yet know. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, warns there is still much we don’t know about the drug’s long-term impact on users’ health. “We don’t know a lot about the things we wish we did,” Collins said at a dinner with journalists sponsored by USA Today and National Geographic. “I’ve been asked repeatedly, does regular marijuana smoking, because you inhale deeply, increase your risk of lung cancer? We don’t know. Nobody’s done that study. … There are aspects of this that probably should be looked at more closely than some of the legalization experts are willing to admit.”
For all of those reasons, it’s wise—even if it’s less and less culturally fashionable—to greet claims of marijuana’s supposed benignity with a degree of critical skepticism. There’s more at risk here than having to deal with an unexpected case of the munchies or the giggles. And that’s especially true for those of us who are trying to help our children navigate a world in which something that was once culturally taboo isn’t anymore.
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