“Cannabis retailers are not selling to minors and their products are not being diverted to the underage market.”
That’s what NORML, an advocacy group in favor of legalizing marijuana, promises on its website. But the data reveals a different story.
In March 2024, policy analyst Connor Kubeisy wrote an article for The Drug Report, an online source for drug policy news and analysis, highlighting this issue. He writes that dispensaries have been selling cannabis to minors despite their promises, citing numerous surveys and studies from across the United States.
For example, the 2022 Arizona Youth Survey reported that 21% of 12th graders, 13.1% of 10th graders, and 8.2% of 8th graders bought marijuana from a dispensary in Arizona. The 2021 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey revealed that 12% of 12th graders, 6% of 10th graders, and 3% of 8th graders had also said they bought marijuana from a store. And more data—about teenagers in Massachusetts, Colorado, and California and their cannabis use—reveal similar results. In these states, medical and recreational marijuana are legal, but only for adults 21 and older.
Connor also writes that teens use fake IDs to buy alcohol and tobacco; there’s no reason not to think they’d use the same methods to obtain marijuana, further discrediting claims by advocacy groups and cannabis retailers.
With so little regulation and growing concern from the medical community over cannabis’s impact on teenage brain health, we owe it our youth to challenge claims that teenagers can’t access marijuana. NORML’s mission is to “move public opinion sufficiently to legalize the responsible use of marijuana by adults.” If the public doesn’t fully understand the truth behind cannabis use, they may sway the nation’s officials to pass legislation, unknowingly putting American youth in much greater danger.
To read the full article, visit this page.