UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Youth are experimenting with marijuana at increasingly younger ages, despite recent studies showing a decline in cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse and other risky behaviors. Penn State researchers wanted to find out why some adolescents stop using marijuana after trying it the first time, while others continue.
According to Derek Kreager, professor of sociology and criminology, previous research on the cessation of drug use and other criminal activity focused on adulthood. “Good marriages, stable jobs and military service were found to be the motivators for quitting these behaviors. Obviously in adolescence, this isn’t the case, so we wanted to find out what were the motivators that affected marijuana use.” The work was published recently in the online edition of the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology.
Kreager and his research team looked at data from adolescent participants in the ongoing PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) longitudinal study. The researchers restricted their study to about 1,000 teenagers who had initiated marijuana use. “This data set is better than most, as it also contains other valuable information, such as perceptions of drug use and peer networks,” explained Kreager.
They found that youths who tried marijuana for the first time generally had similar attitudes about the drug’s perceived benefits. “Kids aren’t entering into this situation naively, they receive information from older kids and the media. They know that they likely won’t get addicted to it after trying it once, so they use marijuana to test the experience, which is all a part of adolescence,” said Kreager.
After the initial encounters, about 25 percent of respondents stopped using marijuana and reported lower perceptions of the activity as a fun behavior, compared to those who continued using. “Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to be influenced by what their friends were doing, so we can see experimenting with the behavior does not mean they will persist with it. They simply stopped the behavior when they discovered they didn’t like it,” Kreager noted.
Youth who continued using marijuana were also mostly not influenced by their peers, but stated they continued to use the drug because they liked it. “The decision to use marijuana may be more of an individual choice now than it was in the past, perhaps because THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, is in greater concentrations in today’s popular marijuana strains,” said Kreager. “Kids may no longer need their friends to teach them the effects of marijuana or how to interpret them as fun.”
The researchers argue a similar cognitive process may exist among youth for other minor delinquent behaviors. Additionally, their results suggest that someone who experienced the drug and found it lacking would be a strong ally in helping to deglamorize the drug among potential users.
In the future, researchers would like to test their theory more broadly to include additional information such as how the youth felt before and during experimentation with minor delinquent behaviors, who they were with, and what was the outcome. “Is it the novelty of a new experience that keeps many adolescents moving from one risk-taking behavior to another? Or is it lack of a clear identity during this time that increases delinquent experimentation? These are the questions we need answers to,” Kreager said.
Other researchers on the project were Daniel Ragan, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Mexico; and Holly Nguyen, assistant professor of sociology and criminology, and Jeremy Staff, professor of criminology and sociology, both at Penn State.
The work was supported by the W.T. Grant Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, and Penn State’s Population Research Institute, part of the Social Science Research Institute.