Photo: RAUL ARBOLEDA / AFP / Getty Images
A recently published study found that nearly half of college-age students in the United States claimed to have used marijuana in the past year , prompting researchers wondering if the pandemic could have stimulated the record in cannabis use.
“ The COVID pandemic – 19 dramatically changed the way young people interact with each other and offers us the opportunity to examine whether drug use behavior has changed in consequence, ”said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) from the federal government.
“It has made life more boring, more stressful. So if drugs allow you to experience that completely different state of mind, I wonder if that would be a factor that leads people to use them. ”
The study “Monitoring the Future”, funded by NIDA, has investigated drug use among college students and non-college adults from 19 to 22 years since 1980.
The researchers did the editing 2020 through an online survey, consulting about 1, 80 young adults among the 19 March and 30 November 2020, after the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States Gone.
According to the report, the 44 percent of college students reported using marijuana in 2020, an increase of 38 percent increase in 2015. There was also an increase in “daily or almost daily” marijuana use, increasing from 5 percent to 8 percent in five years.
At the same time, reported alcohol consumption among college students decreased from 62 to the 56 percent, and the number of them who claimed to have been intoxicated by alcohol in the last month decreased to 28 percent of 35 percent between 2019 and 2020.
Excessive alcohol consumption, defined as having five or more drinks in an outing at least once in two weeks, fell from 32 to the 24 percent.
Another trend that emerged from the survey was a four percentage point increase in I know college students who use psychedelic drugs, with an increase in hallucinogen use of 5 to 9 percent in 2020.
Although the study does not address the causes behind these trends, scientists speculate that the cost of the pandemic to daily life and mental health may be one of the driving forces behind consumption patterns.
The historical drop in alcohol intake, for example, coincides with a time marked by isolation, quarantine and a stagnation of social events.
“That’s definitely one of the biggest effects of the pandemic,” said John Schulenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who served as principal investigator of the study. “While binge drinking has gradually declined among college students over the past decades, this is a new all-time low, which may reflect the effects of the COVID pandemic – 19 in terms of reducing time with college friends ”.
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