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For Lily-mai Foon Parkin, 18, and Emma Allen, 18, voting in the cannabis legalization and control referendum was a no-brainer.
The two Year 13 students at Wellington High School said that the vast majority of their group had experimented with cannabis and almost all supported legalization.
“Everybody is very interested in voting Yes, although they probably wouldn’t say it if they voted No,” Foon Parkin said.
Allen said he didn’t know anyone his age who voted No, although he noted that his school was in one of the most left-wing constituencies in the country.
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Polls on the cannabis referendum have been inconsistent, with different companies producing wildly different results, although each poll has shown a clear age division.
In the UMR’s most recent poll, 62 percent of voters ages 18-29 supported legalization, while only 30 percent of voters age 60 and older agreed.
Stuff
Emma Allen, 18, and Lily-mai Foon Parkin, 18, support the referendum on cannabis.
“I have the feeling that young people have grown up with it in the media, in songs and on television. It has been normalized. It has not been demonized, it has been celebrated, ”Foon Parkin said.
By comparison, her grandmother’s generation had grown up with media that demonized cannabis as dangerous, she said.
Studies consistently show that the vast majority of New Zealanders have tried cannabis at least once in their life.
A study from the University of Otago found that 80 percent of kiwis had tried cannabis by age 21, and a Horizon survey found 12 percent were regular users.
Despite the steady growth in cannabis use among adults, studies show that the number of young people using the drug has dropped considerably in recent years.
Jude Ball is a public health researcher at the University of Otago who has studied drug use in adolescents.
His research, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, showed a “totally unprecedented” drop in cannabis use among high school students.
Between 2001 and 2012, adolescent cannabis use fell from 38% to 23%, although it appears to have stabilized in subsequent years.
Researchers don’t fully understand what caused the decline, but Ball said a change in parenting style is likely one of the main causes.
“Parents tend to watch children more closely now, this generation has less unsupervised time with friends,” he said.
UNSPLASH
Studies show that the number of young people using cannabis has decreased over the last decade.
“Cannabis is often a consequence of smoking and drinking, which makes sense if they attend fewer parties,” he said.
Similar drops have also been observed in several other social indicators.
Teens in 2020 drink less alcohol, commit fewer crimes, have fewer car accidents, and are less likely to be sexually active compared to their parents’ generation.
Those changes show that teens are gaining independence later in life, Ball said.
RNZ
RNZ’s The Detail podcast explores the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, and asks how psychoactive drugs compare to alcohol.
“When I was in high school in 1980, it was around the 10th year that a lot of people started experimenting with substances. Now, he’s more likely to be around 18 years old, ”he said.
Foon Parkin estimated that about 75 percent of the 13th year students at his school had tried cannabis, but that it was rare for students under the age of 15.
“You have the odd [who tried it young], then a massive influx as you get older, ”he said.
If a ninth or tenth year student smoked cannabis, he said he would care about them.
Allen said that she and many of her colleagues were increasingly concerned about the dangers of cannabis on the black market.
“Weed is more evasive now that he’s back [in her parent’s day]. I know of a lot of people who had negative experiences, who think they had something attached or that it was synthetic, “he said.
Ball said studies of places that had legalized cannabis suggested that teen use of the drug declined after legalization.
A CDC study of high school students in Colorado, Washington and Oregon found that the number of students who had recently used cannabis decreased from 22% to 19% between 2012 and 2017, and was no higher than the national average.
Research from Canada found an even more striking drop in the first year after legalization, with teen use nearly cut in half, from 19.8 percent to 10.4 percent.
“What I would say to voters is: if people are concerned that legalization will open the door to massive youth use, I don’t think that’s the case with what we’ve seen abroad,” Ball said.
One of the explicit purposes of the cannabis legalization and control bill is to protect the health of young people by restricting their access to cannabis.
The bill includes strict rules against supplying cannabis to people under the age of 20, with a maximum penalty of four years in prison.
123RF
Not all cannabis has THC, and like alcohol, the THC content of cannabis can be measured as a percentage.
Ben Birks Ang is a youth drug counselor and deputy director of the NZ Drug Foundation.
He has seen firsthand the impact cannabis can have on young people.
He said it was clear that cannabis use had a greater impact on brain development, with some negative health impacts up to age 25.
“The younger they use a substance for the first time, the more likely they are to have problems later in life,” he said.
Having worked in schools with adolescents who had problems from smoking or selling cannabis, he believed that the way the authority responded to adolescents with problems had a greater impact on their life trajectory than the health effects of the drug itself .
STUFF
The cannabis legalization and control bill proposes to legalize cannabis for personal use.
“I saw many young people who were curious to try cannabis and they shared it with their friends. If they are later labeled as merchants, the way the community treats them changes, “he said.
“If they get expelled and have to change schools and have the reputation of a merchant, that changes their life outcomes much more than their health,” he said.
Both Foon Parkin and Allen were mostly unconcerned about their peers smoking cannabis, but they had more negative views towards teens who smoked cigarettes.
“Cigarettes are definitely much worse for physical health,” Allen said.
When asked to describe the typical cannabis smoker, Allen said they were laid-back, laid-back, open-minded, and out in the open.
