White youths are more likely to use marijuana than Hispanic, black, or Asian youths.1
57 percent of youths aged 12 to 17 agreed that obtaining marijuana would be easy.1
Nearly 25 percent of youths agreed that a lot of drug selling occurs in their neighborhoods.1
Students who smoke marijuana get lower grades and are less likely to graduate from high school, compared with their nonsmoking peers.2
For emergency room patients in the 12 to 17 age range, the rate of marijuana mentions increased 23 percent between 1999 and 2001 (from 55 to 68 per 100,000 population) and 126 percent (from 30 to 68 per 100,000) since 1994.1
The short-term effects of marijuana use can include problems with memory and learning; distorted perception; difficulty in thinking and problem solving; loss of coordination; and increased heart rate.1
Heavy or daily use of marijuana affects the parts of the brain that control memory, attention, and learning.2
Smoking marijuana causes some changes in the brain that are like those caused by cocaine, heroin, and alcohol.2
Studies show that someone who smokes five joints per day may be taking in as many cancer-causing chemicals as someone who smokes a full pack of cigarettes every day.2
Research Excerpts
"Marijuana's resurgent popularity is not limited to any single group of young people. It encompasses wealthy, middle-class, and low-income families. It takes in suburban, urban, and rural youth. It includes high achievers and average students. It involves every ethnicity and every kind of household. As one student reminded me, 'A lot of people think it's just low-life and troubled kids who drink and do weed. But it's not. Everybody's doing it.'"3
"The marijuana issue is about the costs to society of drug-related auto wrecks, accidents, property damage, truancy and school failure, on-the-job mishaps, and lost productivity. It is about newer, more potent, and more dangerous forms of marijuana. It is about cigar style blunts, cocaine-laced woolies, and crack-packed coolies-nonexistent drugs in the 1960s and 1970s-and it is about Jamaican crude and greater THC content. It is about dreams that are cut short; lives that sometimes wind their way from marijuana to cocaine or to school failure or to teenage pregnancy or to crime and violence; lives that have to be delicately put back together in drug treatment programs."3
Media Quotes
"The 420 icon is very well recognized in the subculture of marijuana users, and now it is being used very skillfully to brand," said Alvera Stern, who heads the center's federal division of prevention, application and education. The mainstreaming of terms like "420," she said, gives the false impression that pot smoking is socially acceptable and widespread. "It gives credence to a marijuana user's perception that everyone is doing it, in spite of data from four major national surveys showing the majority of people have never used marijuana in their lives," Stern said.4
