'Legal weed doesn’t hurt youth outcomes; Jeff Sessions doesn’t care'
Soon after his election, Donald Trump announced he would appoint Jeff Sessions as attorney general, sending a wave of panic through the world of activism around legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Sessions is an old-line drug warrior who opposes all state-level efforts to liberalize marijuana laws, and it was widely feared he would reverse Obama-era Department of Justice policies recommending that federal authorities not interfere with states that legalize marijuana.
In July, Sessions made his first tentative move toward cracking down on states that legalize pot, sending a letter to Washington state officials in which he expressed skepticism about marijuana legalization, repeatedly singling out the fear that such laws would lead to more pot smoking among minors.
If Sessions is legitimately concerned about high school kids and that's not just a front for promoting laws that are disproportionately enforced on black people, then he probably shouldn't worry so much. A new study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that the effects of liberalizing marijuana laws on the behavioral outcomes of minors are . . . well, nothing. At least nothing of significance.
“Zeroes are always hard to sell," said study author Angela K. Dills, an economics professor at Western Carolina University.
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"Notably, many of the outcomes predicted by critics of liberalizations, such as increases in youth drug use and youth criminal behavior, have failed to materialize in the wake of marijuana liberalizations," the report reads.
In fact, the researchers found the opposite: Marijuana liberalization was associated with "reduced marijuana, alcohol, and other drug use; reduced desirability of consuming these substances; and reduced access to these substances on school property."
In fairness, it's not clear that those correlations are anything beyond coincidence. As Dills told Salon, there's been a trend of young people exhibiting less interest in risky behavior than their forebears. Kids these days smoke less, drink less, use fewer drugs and have less risky sex than their elders did. For all we know, Dills added, they may be better at managing boredom than previous generations, since they have computers and phones and video games to distract them.
Dills emphasized that the study doesn't really show any positive effects on youth behavior from marijuana legalization either. Mostly she hoped these findings would "be reassuring to people who are really worried about possible effects of these laws on young people."
Marijuana legalization or decriminalization apparently doesn't do much to change young people's behavior. Getting arrested for possessing or selling marijuana, however, can have a massive impact on a person's life.
