"More and More Teenagers Are Coming to School High, N.Y.C. Teachers Say": Teenagers, Marijuana, and Legalization
some additional context for a New York Times article, with charts
This post is prompted by a recent New York Times article by Ashley Southall, headlined "More and More Teenagers Are Coming to School High, N.Y.C. Teachers Say". The unstated part of the question prompted by that headline is “compared to when, exactly”? The most obvious inference to be drawn is “since the opening of the commercial retail market in marijuana in New York City, five months ago.” (The first day of officially licensed New York City retail shops selling cannabis products was December 30, 2022.)
Interestingly, the article content itself does not make that claim, and while the story does focus some attention on the proliferation of unlicensed pot shops over the course of 2022—while state & local government efforts were making the legislative sausage required for a regulated NYC commercial regime—the story has nothing at all to say in relation to the recent official rollout of the officially licensed retail outlets. And the source found at the link highlighted in the beginning of the story—an article in NYC Chalkbeat, an internet publication focusing on local doings in New York City—had to have been written in reference to a situation that already existed before officially licensed commercial legalization; it was published January 4, 2023.
The New York Times article also provides some details from earlier years that cast doubt on the implied takeaway of the headline:
There is little definitive data on marijuana use among children, and what information is available can sometimes offer a contradictory picture. Disciplinary data from the city education department reflects a 10 percent increase in alcohol- and drug-related offenses this year compared to 2019. But a city survey found teen cannabis use had declined in 2021, the same year that the state legalized marijuana for recreational use, to the lowest level recorded since the question was added to the survey in 1997…
(Italics mine. For figures from an on-topic nationwide survey by the U. Michigan Monitoring The Future Project covering the years 1991-2022, refer to the chart at the bottom of the page.)
Southall then goes on to provide opinions and anecdotal views from an assortment of students and teachers. While quite a few are quoted and I don’t doubt the validity of the sources and the sincerity of their views, it should also be noted that anecdotal accounts of any sort are a slippery slope, including for a journalist employed in a newsroom. Their editors will do what they want with the reporter’s draft, and nothing stops them from shaping it up for hot-take tabloid journalism and propaganda- whether the story topic is about drugs, NIMBY controversies, wars, or whatever. (At its worst, the game is as phony as Hollywood can get at its worst. Maybe someone should do a Robert Altman type take on it, recasting The Player in the newsroom.)
The 237 posts in the story comments for the NYT article also contain a lot of anecdotes. And also many speculations and predictions (mostly of doom, and civilizational collapse.) I have a couple of posted comments in there myself. They aren’t anecdotes, speculations, or predictions, though. Unlike the case with many NYT stories on cannabis (which often draw >1000 comments), the antis were out in full force on this one, and I was a dissenting minority opinion. A certain sort of head might find that comment section educational and even entertaining to peruse. I may use some of the comments as grist for a future post, possibly.
I don’t doubt that stories related in the New York Times article are real, or that kids are rampantly smoking weed and coming to school high. The thing is that this has been happening for more than half a century, in many places almost as a rite of passage for teenagers, especially the boys. Some of them do it it every day.
Not just in the big cities, either. Ever since the national marijuana market matured and stabilized from coast to coast- by 1975, no more than three years later at the outside- kids attending classes after smoking weed- or skipping classes, to smoke weed- has happened at some time or other in the vast majority of high schools in the country, public or private, in nearly every school district in the country. I knew kids my age in towns of 300 residents who had their connections wired back in 1971.
So there isn’t anything new about kids smoking weed and showing up in class high. Marijuana has been very popular with American young people for over 50 years. So has alcohol, of course. Not nearly as many kids show up in class under the influence of alcohol, compared to pot. (Although it does happen.) But there are some marked differences between the two phenomena. I think the most important one is that in the places where it’s illegal, the retailers for marijuana are other teenagers- their classmates, to be clear. Their fellow students. A school that hosts an illicit retail economy of peer-to-peer drug sales is liable to have a lot of energy sapped from its mission right from the jump.
There’s also the fact that cannabis provides a more tractable high than alcohol, of course. It’s easier to “maintain”, as we used to say. It’s easier to maintain a surface impression of sobriety, that is, even though you’re too stuporous to multiply two two-digit numbers even when allowed to use a pencil and paper. No, I don’t endorse trying to learn any skill by getting high on marijuana. If someone is ever going to get into using weed, that’s to be saved for after the skills get learned. This is especially true of academic skill sets. Those skills are not optional. I can do sums in my head- did I not learn any of the basics of math while stoned on weed. I didn’t learn any of the basics of reading and writing while stoned on weed, either.
Taken in aggregate, potheads are mellow and easygoing compared to drunks. But I don’t think that’s the crucial factor in the comparative lack of kids showing up to school drunk, and not being drunk around the clock.
For teenagers, what really provides the advantage of pot over alcohol as far as encouraging the acquisition of heavy use or a daily habit is that your friends and classmates aren’t running the local retail liquor business. They’re running the local retail pot business. For high school graduating classes up to the year 2014 (in Colorado and Washington State only), drug dealers were the only people who could run the local retail market in marijuana, and nearly all of the retail salespeople who sold directly to teenagers were other teenagers. No matter the household income level, the ethnic identity, the neighborhood, or the particular school in question. Although it has to be said: illicit drug dealing has always been a >90% male business. (And >60% of the heavy user population.) User or dealer, most people start into the game while adolescents.
Illegal drug dealing is often fun, for teenagers. It has yet to get serious, in terms of the law. The participants are afforded minor status protections for their violations. (That’s a good thing, in balance. But some teenage drug dealers can’t help but work it.)
Marijuana was Prohibited, by some of Adults, to Criminalize all of the Adults, Everywhere in the U.S. of A. Illegal. For all the good it did.
For minors, alcohol is a binge thing. It’s still the drug that’s used by the most teenagers. As an experiment, or episodically. Alcohol is sufficiently popular and used casually enough that it’s often possible to divert some stock to supply teenage demand. Occasionally. In household quantities. But adults run the alcohol markets. Therefore, most minors find that alcohol is much more difficult to use on a regular basis, compared with marijuana.Because if you don’t have convincing photo ID showing your age to be over 21, you don’t have the connection to the plug.
In my assessment, that thriving teenage-staffed illicit retail market in weed is what primarily accounts for the fact that in the decades since official government reports like the ONDCP and SAMSHA surveys have been keeping score, the age cohort comprising the second-largest number of marijuana users- and heavy marijuana users- is teenage boys. Males in the age range 12-17. (The top cohort is males age 18-25.) It’s been that way for decades.
There’s no way for reporter Ashley Southall to have any firsthand perspective on the marijuana (or other substance) habits of American teenagers from the last quarter of the 20th century- she’s too young. The students she interviewed are too young. The teachers are all probably too young.
I’m not dismissing the concerns expressed in the article by pointing that out. This isn’t a hand-wave. I don’t want to see teenagers showing up for class high on weed. More to the point, I don’t want to see anyone failing at learning scholastic skills because they’re impaired from being high on weed. Or anything else. It’s a real problem, and a significant one. But not a new one. It’s a problem that’s older than the median age of the U.S. population. A pandemic that turned endemic many years ago, before the turn of the century.
It’s unfair to blame a legal retail marijuana market only inaugurated five months ago for a problem that pre-existed it by 45-55 years. And much too early to draw conclusions about the success of controlled and regulated legal sales. The legal regulated market with effectively enforced age restrictions on retailers is the most logical way to address the problem of underage substance use- and the one with proven success. As a non-smoker of tobacco, I saw the changes in enforcement diligence for age-restricted tobacco purchase between the 1960s and the 1990s. In the 1970s, regulations were there on paper, but enforcement was a joke. There was no accountability for retailers, and the penalties for selling tobacco to minors were trivial. By the 1990s, effective regulation and penalties had been implemented in most parts of the country, including strict enforcement of age restrictions that had been once easy for minors to get around.
The enforcement of age restrictions for the purchase of tobacco products is the biggest success story in the history of American drug policy, and it provides strong evidence that substances can remain on the commercial market under a regulatory regime of restrictive controls without being banned entirely, as long as the regulations are effectively enforced with heavy penalties for non-compliant sellers. In the example of tobacco, decades went by before anyone in power took the problem of tobacco use by minors seriously enough to implement effective enforcement. Enforcement of age restrictions for marijuana purchases should be an easier lift (although not an effortless one.) I don’t know of any reason why a diligent regime of regulatory enforcement of age restrictions for cannabis products can’t be implemented over a timespan that’s more like 1-2 years than 15-20 years. But insisting on total enforcement compliance after only five months of the new regulatory regime for marijuana is imperious.
Long-term context: the chart below shows the measured 30-day prevalence of Daily marijuana and alcohol use by 8th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade students, 1991-2022, as surveyed by the Monitoring The Future program of the University of Michigan. (All charts provided should be expandable with a touchpad or mouse click.)
The chart for Daily Use of Marijuana, Alcohol, and Tobacco for Grades 8, 10, and 12 Combined, 1991-2022
The U. Michigan Monitoring The Future (MTF) program began doing the first set of its surveys in 1975, making it the longest-running survey of drug and alcohol use by Americans that I know of; the surveys have widened their scope over the years and become much more detailed- along with presenting much more transparent statements of methodology than those of the SAMHSA NSDUH and ONDCP surveys I’ve seen. The U. Michigan MTF project has received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the NIH since its inception, and its primary source data is used- in some fashion- in official reports, presumably including those by SAMHSA and the ONDCP. I haven’t yet done a comparison of the tables and charts from the MTF project with those of the recent NSDUH reports, but I know this much: the data sets of MTF reports most often go back many years before any of the survey results I’ve accessed in NSDUH reports. Long-term context over time is imperative in order to gain an accurate picture of substance use by Americans (and also features of American illicit drugs markets such as amounts confiscated, and estimated annual quantities consumed.)