The New NORML

Stumbled across this tweet today, from Christopher Ingraham's Washington Post Wonkblog.

New federal data: rates of teen marijuana use essentially unchanged in Colorado and Washington post-legalization https://t.co/AhlelX464S

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 18, 2015

I would expect someone using the title "wonk" self-referentially would be a little more "wonky." What Ingraham has done is to mis-represent a survey's findings. Then he published a story with the headline that would be amplified and re-tweeted throughout the marijuana-legalization web universe.

Right in the first paragraph, Ingraham asserts that there was "no change in monthly marijuana use in nearly every U.S. state compared to last year."

In fact, Ingraham continues, "the only significant changes were in Rhode Island, Ohio and Hawaii, where monthly marijuana use fell year over year."

In the age of ever-shrinking attention spans, this false "factoid" is going to be the takeaway. We've gone from Two Minutes' Hate all the way down to Two Seconds' Hate. The takeaway is that all the alarmists' predictions of increasing use after legalization were wrong.

Ingraham admits that in the two states that have legalized marijuana, Washington and Colorado, teen marijuana use "ticked up." But that increase, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, wasn't "statistically significant."

Ingraham didn't bother to check the survey's methodology, or even do some basic math.

The Colorado teen marijuana use for the years 2013-2014 was 12.6 percent. The corresponding marijuana use for the years 2012-2013 was 11.2 percent. The way to find the percentage point increase is to subtract 11.2 from 12.6. The result is a 1.4 percentage point increase.

Then, to find the percent increase, divide that by 11.2. The percent increase in Colorado teen marijuana use is therefore 12.5 percent. That is a little more than than "statistically significant." That is alarming.

Especially when you realize that 2014 was the first full year of legalization in Colorado. SAMHSA lumped 2014 in with 2013, so they included statistics from before legalization. It would be reasonable to infer that the increase due to legalization is much higher- perhaps 20-25 percent.

When one out of eight people under the age of eighteen admit to abusing a powerful drug with known consequences for their still-developing brains, you have a public health crisis.

What a "wonk" should do, is instead of measuring usage, is measure second-order effects, like test scores, teen arrest rates, teen involuntary psychiatric admissions, and property crime. That's the benefit of having a state laboratory of democracy like Colorado.

At least, we can hope, they are getting off the Ritalin.