Risk Factors for Adolescent Marijuana Use

Abstract

Marijuana use has been linked to a wide variety of negative consequences, especially for those who initiate use in early adolescence and become daily or regular users as a teenager. If these negative consequences are to be avoided, prevention efforts must focus upstream on childhood and adolescent developmental periods before marijuana use is initiated or has become frequent. Upstream prevention targets factors that predict initiation and escalation of marijuana use, which are often called risk and protective factors. This chapter provides a review of current knowledge about risk and protective factors, with an emphasis on psychosocial variables specific to marijuana, differentiating predictors of marijuana use from predictors of other legal and illegal drugs when possible. The chapter also provides suggestions for future research in light of the rapidly changing legal and community conditions related to access, availability, and norms of marijuana use.

Marijuana Use among Adolescents and Emerging Adults in the Midst of Policy Change: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Numbers are from a search of PubMed, specifying words in the title by using the BTI^search term. There were 19 additional articles with Bsmoking^in the title; 7 in 2000-2008 and 12 in 2009-2018 understanding of the secular trends and developmental patterns of marijuana use in the rapidly changing social, normative, and policy context, including identification of marijuanaspecific risk and protective factors from multiple domains, e.g., community, school, family, peers, and mass media (e.g., Catalano et al 2018). As the liberalization of marijuana laws becomes more commonplace, a continued focus on the effects on adolescents and emerging adults is needed, with an increased emphasis on RMLs and a consideration of subgroups that may be disproportionately affected by policy changes, either by virtue of their location (e.g., proximity to retail outlets), school characteristics, or individual characteristics (e.g., exposure to parental substance use).…”

Using Existing Data to Advance Knowledge About Adolescent and Emerging Adult Marijuana Use in the Context of Changes in Marijuana Policies

“…NSDUH is particularly useful for prevention science research because it includes measures of several marijuanaspecific risk factors, which are strong predictors of future drug use (e.g., Catalano et al 2018). These include marijuanarelated perceptions, including injunctive norms such as perceived wrongfulness of use and peer and parental disapproval, as well as the perceived harmfulness associated with use.…”