Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kerry M. The authors examined the effects of heavy adolescent marijuana use on employment, marriage, and family formation and tested both dropping out of high school and adult marijuana use as potential mediators of these associations among a community sample of African Americans followed longitudinally from age 6 to age 32— They used propensity score matching to reduce selection bias when estimating the effects of heavy adolescent marijuana use.
Logistic regression results on the sample matched on sex, and early demographic and behavioral variables showed that adolescent marijuana use has adult social behavioral consequences: Use of marijuana 20 times or more during adolescence was associated with being unemployed and unmarried in young adulthood and having children outside of marriage for both males and females.
Dropping out of high school and more frequent adult marijuana use seem to be important parts of the pathway from adolescent marijuana use to negative life outcomes.
Keywords: adolescent marijuana use, social behavioral functioning, longitudinal studies, long-term consequences. Marijuana is the most common of all illicit substances used by adolescents. Even though many of the concurrent effects that result from teenage drug use e. This information would be useful in developing drug prevention and intervention programs. Because adolescence is an important time for the development of skills necessary to function as an adult in society, marijuana use, especially heavy use, may impede skill acquisition necessary for adequate performance of adult roles.
Heavy marijuana use poses particular problems because of its association with drug abuse and dependence, and heavier use seems to be related to poorer outcomes e. Though these explanations are vague regarding mechanisms and neither has been tested extensively, both suggest that early drug use interferes with the acquisition of psychosocial skills necessary to perform adequately in adult roles. For example, an adolescent who enters employment, marriage, or parenthood at a very young age is not likely to be prepared for the responsibilities that go along with these roles, and problematic outcomes may occur, such as economic disadvantage, job instability, or divorce.
