‘Weed’ing Out One’s Future

It is 15 days before Election Day and my political juices are flowing. As a result of this increased flowage (yes, flowage is an actual word), you’re about to read my second politically-tinged column of the week and the second column concerning marijuana – an unprecedented event. I go back to this issue because if states like Massachusetts pass a law decriminalizing marijuana use on November 4th, I believe it will set back the health of a significant portion of our youth – a setback sure to last into their adulthood. A Duke University study illustrates this.

In one of the longest and most in-depth studies I’ve seen, a team of researchers from universities in Britain, New Zealand and the United States followed a group of 1,000 people from their birth, all the way up to the age of 32. Not knowing how their lives would turnout, the researchers basically followed their health throughout their 32 years of existence and developed a study based on similarities that developed in those years.

The similarities – and dissimilarities – they chose to focus on were with respect to drug use, family structure and how these experiences in their teen years affected their adult years.

As one would guess, the 1,000 participants came from very different backgrounds with various family issues, (e.g. families where abuse and crime were common). Many of the participants that came from these rocky families had behavioral issues that lasted throughout their childhood. These participants often wound up doing alcohol and marijuana before the age of 15 as well, but some did not.

On the flipside, approximately half of the participants studied that smoked marijuana and drank before the age of 15 came from stable homes and did not have any behavioral issues in their childhood.

How’d their lives turn out? Despite their diametrically-opposed upbringings, the participants studied wound up with similar health consequences.

For instance, the so-called “good kids – those that didn’t have behavioral problems in their childhood, came from stable homes, but used drugs prior to their 15th birthday – were three times more likely to use drugs into their adulthood than the so-called “bad kids” who did not use drugs. Further, the “good kids” were more likely to become involved with crime, have a sexually transmitted disease, and have an early pregnancy. As Duke University psychologist and co-author of the study Avshalom Caspi said, “The good kids who do drugs end up looking like the bad kids who didn’t do drugs.”

As far as the “good” and “bad” kids that both used drugs before the age of 15, they tended to use drugs into their adulthood at about equivalent rates.

As the researchers say, the teenage years are the prime years for a person’s development. The influences and societal pressures play a role in how their future is shaped. Certainly, a quality, loving family plays a role as well, but as this study suggests, one’s interaction and exposure to drugs plays an even larger role, independent of how “good” or “bad” their behavior was as a child.

The decriminalization of marijuana poses a greater risk to a young person’s future because it increases the chances of their exposure to it. Some may deny it, but decriminalization pot will wind up costing our youth a healthy future – a cost far greater than some $100 fine that will do nothing to curb its use.