Oh, to be a parent of teenagers! How to guide them as they venture off on their sometimes risky adventures of young adulthood? There is no way to bubblewrap their journey to safeguard them as they test boundaries and make a few poor decisions. It’s a precarious position for the teens and their nervous parents both as they start to untie those apron strings. Of course, one inevitable area of teen exploration will be with drugs and alcohol. As a parent, it’s hard to know how to talk to your kids about the pitfalls of experimenting with mood and mind altering substances. Which is more detrimental to those precious and still-developing brain cells?
Well, one pediatrician did the mental and emotional gymnastics to weigh out the risks of both in a recent NY Times opinion piece. Even doctors can have moral quandaries but taking into account such factors as risks of illegality, dependence, and propensity of abuse, he finds the scales shift ever so slightly to favoring marijuana over alcohol.
When someone asks me whether I’d rather my children use pot or alcohol, after sifting through all the studies and all the data, I still say “neither.” Usually, I say it more than once. But if I’m forced to make a choice, the answer is “marijuana.”
With the recently relaxed regulations on marijuana, both recreational and medical, can now finally be studied more openly as there has be a void in the past of reliable scientific data on the effects of cannabis especially on adolescent usage. Whereas alcohol has been studied six ways to Sunday and back again, new data is coming in to analyze and compare the effect of the two substances in teens. As in this study by Joseph J. Palamar, PhD, MPH, a CDUHR affiliated researcher and an assistant professor of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center:
“The paucity of research is of particular public health concern as alcohol and marijuana are the two most commonly used psychoactive substances among adolescents,” “Nearly half of high school seniors have used marijuana in their lifetime and over two-thirds have used alcohol, but few studies have compared adverse psychosocial outcomes of alcohol and marijuana directly resulting from use.”
“In particular, the relationship between frequent alcohol use and regret was much stronger than the relationship between frequent marijuana use and regret. The most alarming finding was that alcohol use was highly associated with unsafe driving, especially among frequent drinkers. Compared to non-drinkers, frequent drinkers were over 13 times more likely to report that their alcohol use has led to unsafe driving. Marijuana users, compared to non-users, were three times more likely to report unsafe driving as a direct result of use.”
And if parents are still racked with anxiety going into those formative teen years, just remember that experimentation in moderation does not usually lead to heavy usage and most teens survive to become the inquisitive, accomplished adults they were meant to be. Just like a certain young Barry Obama who seems to have made it through life quite well indeed after a little dabbling in marijuana culture.
“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”
