Vaping is growing more prevalent among young people — in 2021, 1 in 9 high school students said they had vaped in the past month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Increasingly, those kids are vaping cannabis. But is vaping a gateway to marijuana use?
A new study suggests that is the case, finding that adolescents who use e-cigarettes are over three times more likely to use cannabis than those who don’t — and that more than 1 in 10 youths who say they have never used cannabis go on to do so within a year.
The research, published in JAMA Network Open, relies on the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study, which has been surveying a nationally representative group of people about their use of tobacco since 2013. Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor looked at a cohort of 9,828 youths who reported that they had never used marijuana.
Between 2017 and 2019, they found, those who reported vaping were more likely to say they had begun using cannabis one year later than those who didn’t use e-cigarettes. The researchers ruled out factors such as socioeconomic status and other substance use.
Of the adolescents who hadn’t used cannabis at the beginning of the study, nearly 11 percent used cannabis in the following year, even those who had never used tobacco. But those who said they had smoked e-cigarettes were far more likely to move on to cannabis. E-cigarette users were 3.2 times more likely to use cannabis and 2.9 percent more likely to say they had used it within the past month. [Read More @ The Washington Post]
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