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By Sandy Wells KABC News A Michigan researcher says the use of alcohol, tobacco cigarettes and drugs by teens has gone down. Richard Miech, Investigator on the “Monitoring The Future Report” says this trend began decades ago. “We started this survey in 1975. So, we have measures of adolescent drug use and teen drug use in the 70s and it was much higher then. This decline we see today, when we are at the lowest level of drugs, alcohol and tobacco use we’ve ever seen – is not something that happened suddenly. This decline has been happening for ten, twenty years, especially for smoking.” Miech says drug, alcohol and tobacco use climbed again from the early to mid-90s and then started the downward trend that continues to this day. As marijuana prohibitions are loosened in a number of states, some are fearful this will cause drug use to rise again. Yet, Miech says there is a correlation between smoking tobacco and pot that would appear to ease this concern. “The levels of pot smoking among tobacco cigarette smokers is very high, at least among teens. Sixty to 70 percent who are smoking cigarette report that they smoked marijuana in the past year. And if you don’t smoke a cigarette, it turns out your level of pot smoking is substantially smaller.” Miech says cutting back on smoking among teens seems to have had the unintended consequence of reducing drug use as well. Miech was a guest on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning Show with Doug McIntyre. |
