Study: US Teens Choosing Pot Over Cigarettes

There is good news in the fight against tobacco use among today’s youth. According to a government study sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cigarette smoking among young people is continuing to drop. The only real issue with the study is they also found that teen marijuana use is way up.

The hard data is that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week that 23 percent of high school students said that they had recently smoked marijuana. Only 18 percent responded to the survey saying they had recently smoked a cigarette.

The purpose of the survey was to ask America’s teens about risky behaviors.

The decline in the amount of cigarette smokers in nothing new. It has been many years since the number of cigarette smokers has increased. Marijuana use on the other hand has fluctuated every year. A contributing factor to that is that marijuana is not one of those things you find heavily targeted in the media or schools. While marijuana may be considered to be harmful to your health, more and more students are figuring out that there are medical uses for marijuana and its recreational use has less harmful indications than alcohol or cigarettes, both of which are legal.

For the last two years marijuana use has eclipsed the amount of cigarette smokers. experts say the drop in teen smoking can be attributed to higher levels of awareness over the dangers of smoking and the price increases enacted by most States and the Federal government to control tobacco use.

The University of Michigan recently ran a survey to determine the same question regarding marijuana use and cigarettes. They also found that more people were smoking pot than cigarettes. they found more teens think cigarettes are dangerous than they do marijuana.