| The most popular ball sport on any college campus these days. |
According to a University of Michigan study of about 1,100 college students nationwide as part of the ongoing, government-funded Monitoring the Future study, 51 percent of all full-time students admitting that they’ve expanded their minds at least once with a little toke. Researchers say pot use on campus is up to the highest it’s been since the study started in 2006, when 34 percent said they had smoked pot at least once.
And that’s the part of the study that will get the most amount of press, of course (especially since the researchers put out a press release with that exact angle). But the real story here is that, while alcohol by students dipped some, 63 percent of all students still say they’ve drank in the last 30 days with a majority of them drinking to excess.
About 5.1 percent of full-time college students say they smoke herb on a daily or near-daily basis. Students have been that high (pardon the pun) since the early 1980s.
“In other words, one in every 20 college students was smoking pot on a daily or near-daily basis in 2013, including one in every 11 males and one in every 34 females. To put this into a longer-term perspective, from 1990 to 1994, fewer than one in 50 college students used marijuana that frequently,” the report says.
Now compare that with the study results on booze. In 2013, 63 percent of students say they’ve had a drink in the last 30 days, down from a peak of 69 percent in 2008. More than half of those students (35 percent) said they had binged and drank more than five drinks in a night at least once in the past two weeks.
“Particularly worrisome are rates of what the investigators call ‘extreme binge drinking,'” The researchers wrote in a release this week. “Averaged across years 2005 to 2013, they find that one in eight (13 percent) college students had 10+ drinks and one in 20 (5 percent) had 15+ drinks in a row in the past two weeks.”
We don’t have to go into how much more dangerous alcohol consumption can be than marijuana use, or how about 2,000 students die every year from alcohol-related deaths.
The study also showed that illegal use of prescription drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are up, with 11 percent of all students saying they’ve popped some pills in the last year. Ecstasy use is also up from 2.2 percent in 2007 to 5.8 percent in 2013. Considering that that the ‘Molly’ they are dipping isn’t likely real MDMA anymore, that means more kids are blindly dipping their fingers into mystery powdered baggies on their nights out.
And yet, marijuana is still the main thing being discussed because…. wait, why is marijuana still the main thing being discussed?
