Marijuana Use USA

Below are graphs and statistical tables showing marijuana use in the USA from the 2004 survey. The first table/graph shows the numbers who have "EVER" used marijuana. This would include anyone who had ever shared a single joint or eaten a hash cookie. They do not need to be regular users, this statistics just records that they have, at sometime in their lives, tried marijuana.

Overall the numbers from this survey suggest that marijuana use USA are high since over 40% of the population have tried marijuana at least once and that this figure rises to over half the population between the age of 18 and 50 years.

That's a lot of dopeheads!!!

Interestingly the group that you might expect to have high usage would be the over 50s. This group, after all, were the hippy generation, love, peace and Woodstock! So why are we not seeing a considerably higher matijuana use?

There are a couple of possible reasons.

1/ This is one of the problems with surveys, they depend on people being honest and sometimes people have reasons lead to them being less than honest. Many of the 'hippies' are now

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respectable citizens and have conveniently 'forgotten' their past indiscretions, particularly the illegal ones.

2/ The age group is 50 and over, so it will contain a lot of people who were not involved in the hippy and psychedelic movement of the 60s due to age or outlook.

3/ There may have been a considerable exaggeration by the media of the numbers and behaviour of a minority.

With marijuana use at such a level, even if it is only on one occasion, it demonstrates that use of illicit drug is not an underground activity indulged in by the minority. Instead it shows that the majority have been, at some time, been prepared to break the law regarding drugs, ie they are criminals. This begs two questions, is a law that criminalises over half the population a sensible law, is drug prevention (both legislation and education)working?

The final point to be made from this data on marijuana use is that it drives a bus through the 'Gateway theory'. Basically the gateway theory was a suggestion that marijuana was the gateway to other, presumably more dangerous, drug use. That is that marijuana use led to addictive drug use. The theory was formulated on the observation that most heroin, and other dangerous drug users, had used marijuana prior to their later drug use. While it is quite possibly true that heroin users used marijuana first, if we look at

the statistics for heroin use in the USA we can see that the numbers of heroin users are minute compared to the marijuana users. So even if a small number do progress to heroin use this is by far the minority, suggesting that marijuana use is not a gateway to more dangerous drugs. Indeed by far the majority use marijuana with little or no problem (click here for marijuana effects).

If we look at the table and graph below we see that, not only is progression to harder drugs a rarity, that for most marijuana use is an activity in which they indulge when young. Clearly it is an activity that decreases with age. Compared to the over 40% of the population who have tried marijuana, just over 10% using in the last year and under 4% using twice a week or more.