When Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) served as governor of Colorado in 2012, he unsuccessfully tried to convince voters to reject a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, in large part because he worried it would encourage more use by young people. But with years of data now generated by his state and other that have since enacted legalization, he\u2019s admitting that his concern was unfounded.<\/p>\n
The senator recorded a video message for an event organized by the Coalition for Cannabis Policy, Education, and Regulation (CPEAR) on Thursday, in which he talked about Colorado\u2019s history with legalization and focused on clearing up misconceptions around the impact of that reform on underage consumption.<\/p>\n
Around the time of Colorado\u2019s historic 2012 legalization vote at the ballot, Hickenlooper was known to say that the measure \u201csends the wrong message to kids.\u201d Now as a U.S. senator, he\u2019s a champion of the reform, touting the state\u2019s progress and calling for federal descheduling.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe really did lead the way in marijuana legalization. It\u2019s been 10 years since we legalized recreational marijuana through our Amendment 64 statewide citizen-driven initiative that I opposed,\u201d he said at the CPEAR event. \u201cI didn\u2019t want Colorado to be the experiment\u2014the Petri dish\u2014for one of the great social experiments of the century so far. And we legalized it even though I opposed it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we created a pretty good framework. Most of the other states have either followed it or wished they followed it,\u201d the senator said, adding that \u201ca big focus for me was I was so nervous about kids,\u201d including his own younger children, who might \u201cuse marijuana more frequently\u201d if the state legalized.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019ve proven and demonstrated that there is no increase in experimentation among teenagers. There is no change in frequency of use, no change in driving while high\u2014all the things we most worried about didn\u2019t come to pass,\u201d Hickenlooper said.<\/p>\n
The senator also said talked about tax revenue from marijuana sales going to support the state\u2019s public education system\u2014something Colorado Treasurer Dave Young also emphasized during an interview<\/a> with Marijuana Moment on Thursday.<\/p>\n And as an aside, Hickenlooper also stressed the importance of the criminal justice aspects of enacting reform.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s gotta be some level of equity and making sure that the communities that had been most most burdened and damaged by the war on drugs get a fair shot at the opportunities for entrepreneurship,\u201d the former governor said.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the same time, we\u2019re protecting youth. Again, it\u2019s an amazing thing to me,\u201d he said. \u201cI was pretty surprised that the data overwhelmingly showed again and again, this was a situation where the data that came out was different than almost everyone expected.\u201d<\/p>\n He said that data \u201ccontains the most compelling reasons why we should deschedule marijuana on a national level and let states make up their own mind about how they want to go about implementing marijuana in their own states just like we do with alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n As Hickenlooper has said previously, while youth use not increased, more elderly residents have begun patronizing cannabis shops<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ahead of the event<\/a> on Thursday, the alcohol and tobacco industry-backed marijuana policy group CPEAR, whose executive director previously served as Hickenlooper\u2019s cannabis czar in state government, also released a report analyzing data on youth marijuana use rates<\/a> amid the state-level legalization movement.<\/p>\n The report points to studies that plainly contradict claims often made by prohibitionists that creating regulated cannabis markets would lead more underage people to consume marijuana.<\/p>\n CPEAR\u2019s new 29-page report details how researchers have consistently found that youth marijuana use \u201ceither decreases or remains flat in regulated cannabis markets\u201d\u2014a point that\u2019s been\u00a0supported by recent federally funded surveys<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the most recent surveys stressed that\u00a0youth marijuana use \u201cdecreased significantly\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in 2021, as did teen consumption of illicit substances overall.<\/p>\n Related to the report\u2019s findings and the senator\u2019s remarks, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow has also conceded that her earlier concerns about increases in youth marijuana consumption resulting from legalization have so far prove unfounded, describing it as a \u201ca surprising finding\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in an interview with Marijuana Moment late last year.<\/p>\n In another recent interview, Volkow\u00a0conceded that advocates were \u201cright\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that teen cannabis use wouldn\u2019t spike after legalization was enacted.<\/p>\n Even at an event hosted by the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), Volkow affirmed that adolescent marijuana use remains \u201cstable\u201d even as more states legalize cannabis.<\/p>\n The 2020 federally funded Monitoring the Future survey further found that cannabis consumption among adolescents \u201cdid not significantly change<\/a>\u00a0in any of the three grades for lifetime use, past 12-month use, past 30-day use, and daily use from 2019-2020.\u201d<\/p>\n Another federally funded study, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), was released in October\u00a0showing that youth marijuana use dropped in 2020<\/a>\u00a0amid the coronavirus pandemic and as more states moved to enact legalization.<\/p>\n Further, an analysis published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in September found that enacting legalization has an overall impact on adolescent cannabis consumption that is\u00a0\u201cstatistically indistinguishable from zero.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n The U.S. Department of Education\u2019s National Center for Education Statistics also analyzed youth surveys of high school students from 2009 to 2019 and concluded that there\u2019s been \u201cno measurable difference\u201d in the percentage of those in grades 9-12 who reported consuming cannabis at least once in the past 30 days.<\/p>\n In a separate, earlier analysis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that marijuana consumption among high school students declined during the peak years of state-legal recreational cannabis legalization.<\/p>\n There was\u00a0\u201cno change\u201d in the rate of current cannabis use<\/a>\u00a0among high school students from 2009-2019, the survey found. When analyzed using a quadratic change model, however, lifetime marijuana consumption decreased during that period.<\/p>\n Another study released by Colorado officials in 2020 showed that\u00a0youth cannabis consumption in the state \u201chas not significantly changed since legalization\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in 2012, though methods of consumption are diversifying.<\/p>\n An official with ONDCP\u2019s National Marijuana Initiative went even further last year, admitting that, for reasons that are unclear,\u00a0youth consumption of cannabis \u201cis going down\u201d in Colorado<\/a>\u00a0and other legalized states and that it\u2019s \u201ca good thing\u201d even if \u201cwe don\u2019t understand why.\u201d<\/p>\n Colorado Treasurer Discusses Need For Federal Marijuana Banking Reform And Impact Of Senate Inaction<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n The post Senator Who Previously Opposed Marijuana Legalization Says He Was Wrong About Increased Youth Use<\/a> appeared first on Marijuana Moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) served as governor of Colorado in 2012, he unsuccessfully tried to convince voters to reject a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, in large part because he worried it would encourage more use by young people. But with years of data now generated by his stateContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":458,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,81,126],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53667"}],"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\/458"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53667"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53668,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53667\/revisions\/53668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Senator Who Previously Opposed Marijuana Legalization Says He Was Wrong About Increased Youth Use<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"