Marijuana Use Up In Adults, Not Teens

Communities Count recently completed updating all health indicators, and has added some new ones. Findings include:

Since recreational use of marijuana in Washington became legal in 2012, marijuana use increased among adults, but not among teens.

Substance use among teens: Teens’ self-reported use of alcohol, marijuana, painkillers, or other illegal drugs declined from 34% in 2004 to 24% in 2016, with significant declines across all race/ethnicity groups and regions.
Teens also reported declines in overall tobacco use (excluding e-cigarettes) and cigarette smoking. Among adults, cigarette smoking has declined across all regions, although the decline among South Region adults has stalled. In teens and adults, smoking rates for American Indians/Alaska Natives and Blacks are above the King County average.
Across all substance-use indicators (those listed above, plus teen and adult binge drinking), rates were higher for people who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB). The just-released LGBTQ Community Spotlight offers some context for this pattern, noting that LGB youth were more likely than heterosexual youth to report feeling unsafe at school and on dates, and to report that they had been bullied and that an adult had intentionally hurt them. These findings are consistent with established links between traumatic experience and substance use.
Since expansion of coverage through the Affordable Care Act, the percentage of King County adults without health insurance has dropped by half. However, 1 in 3 Latinos did not have coverage in 2017 – 8 times the rate for non-Hispanic whites and 3 times the rate for African Americans and Native Hawaiians / Pacific Islanders.

Communities Count