Last year, for example, Project SAM, an organization co-founded by former representative Patrick Kennedy and launched in Denver, claimed that national figures from the Department of Health and Human Services showed “heavy marijuana use” was “soaring among young people,” when the stats actually demonstrated that the overall number had dropped substantially. After being called out by the Washington Post, Project SAM withdrew its original press release on the topic.
That could explain why the 2015 Health Kids Colorado Survey, just issued by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (see it below), underlines “not” in the grabbiest weed-related finding in the report: “Four out of five Colorado high school students have not used marijuana in the last thirty days.”
Other findings are similar — yet plenty of people continue to believe that the 2012 passage of Amendment 64, which legalized limited recreational marijuana sales to adults in Colorado, has caused the sort of teen-toking explosion about which Project SAM has been concerned. And Mason Tvert, an A64 proponent who’s now the director of communication for the Marijuana Policy Project, thinks he knows why.
