In the spring of 2017, students at the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, a charter school surrounded by strip malls in Pacoima, a working-class area of Los Angeles boxed in by freeways northeast of downtown, were under siege.<\/p>\n
The hostile force, school founder Yvonne Chan told\u00a0the Los Angeles Daily News,<\/a> was in one of those strip malls: a cannabis dispensary. Most of Chan\u2019s students are Latino and qualified for free or reduced-price lunch; a weed store nearby was just another predatory business, like the nearby \u201cliquor stores, junk yards, and motels,\u201d Chan told the newspaper. \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t be here, period. They\u2019re going to attract our kids into drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n Chan and her students\u2019 parents waged a months-long campaign to shut the dispensary \u2014 an effort made easier because it was one of LA\u2019s<\/a> many unlicensed cannabis stores. But, it should be noted, her reasoning wasn\u2019t zoning but the syllogism that has become axiomatic in the marijuana legalization era: There is some kind of nexus between cannabis stores and cannabis falling into the hands of youth, and if only the stores will go away, so will the weed.<\/p>\n This is why there\u2019s an 800-foot buffer zone between \u201cyouth-serving facilities\u201d and cannabis outlets baked into California state law. This is also why in every state considering legalization,\u00a0most recently Illinois<\/a>, the specter of youth smoking weed is immediately conjured by the prohibition set. This line of logic is predictable as the sun and goes mostly unchallenged, despite the fact that repeated studies have found otherwise.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another one for the books:\u00a0According to a study published in June<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 conducted out of Los Angeles, and funded by the National Institutes on Drug Abuse<\/a> (NIDA) \u2014 there does not appear to be a connection between the density of marijuana dispensaries and youth usage rates.<\/p>\n Writing in the journal Substance Abuse and Misuse, researchers from Drexel University in Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California Department of Pediatrics and the Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles found that a \u201cconcentration\u2026 of dispensaries surrounding young adult marijuana users in Los Angeles was unrelated to days of marijuana use.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of the dispensaries\u2019 existence, what compelled young adults between the ages of 18 and 26 to start using cannabis were \u201cindividual factors,\u201d the researchers found.<\/p>\n The researchers crunched data from 2014-2015, when there were 425 medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. (This figure needs its own note: In the medical-marijuana era, which ended when commercial cannabis dispensaries opened on Jan. 1, 2018, Los Angeles was lousy with dispensaries like the one in Pacoima, that openly sold cannabis without official city licensing. That is, there were far more marijuana outlets in LA then than there are now, and with less oversight.)<\/p>\n The researchers found 329 \u201cyoung adult marijuana users,\u201d 198 of whom had medical-cannabis recommendations. They compared the density of cannabis dispensaries in their area to marijuana use in the past 90 days and found that neither the density of dispensaries, nor how much cannabis was technically legally available to the users had any significant effect. What they\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0find was than young black people used more than their white counterparts, and Hispanics used far less than non-Hispanics \u2014 regardless of how many weed stores were within buying distance.<\/p>\n How relevant is this study in the era of recreational commercial marijuana for adults 21 and over, some of whom may be fearful that children will start smoking weed because the adults are? The study suggests that individuals who use cannabis are using it regardless of immediate availability in stores \u2014 and won\u2019t use less or more if there\u2019s a store nearby.\u00a0<\/p>\n As for the stores themselves: Security at dispensaries is legendary, often annoyingly so, with armed guards and barred windows. Dispensaries stand to lose licensing if they sell to youth\u2014and, as results from stings conducted by state regulators in Oregon and Washington demonstrated, they generally don\u2019t.<\/p>\n The study also looked at patients as young as 18, whose current habits were formed when they were school-age teenagers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Most of this was known when Chan and her students\u2019 parents in Pacoima waged her campaign against the local weed store. She was within her right to do that \u2014 nobody says that anyone has to like cannabis, or anything else. But the evidence suggesting that shutting down the dispensary had any effect on her students\u2019 decisions to use cannabis one way or the other was thin then and thinner now.<\/p>\n She might have more wisely spent her time in the classroom.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you think you\u2019d consume more cannabis if you lived closer to a dispensary?<\/p>\n The post Yet Another Study: Proximity to Dispensaries is Not Why Young People Use Cannabis<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 2017, students at the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, a charter school surrounded by strip malls in Pacoima, a working-class area of Los Angeles boxed in by freeways northeast of downtown, were under siege. The hostile force, school founder Yvonne Chan told\u00a0the Los Angeles Daily News,Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,1980,50,141,53,7202,724],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35994,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993\/revisions\/35994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Proximity Isn\u2019t Primary<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Yet Another Study: Proximity to Dispensaries is Not Why Young People Use Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"