Kids pick marijuana over cigarettes

Why does anyone pretend to be surprised that marijuana continues to be popular? Who the fuck are you people? Of course loads of folks smoke joints, pipes, bongs, cigs, cigars....of all age ranges. They always have and they always will, and you know why? It's because there's nothing wrong with it.

I realized after making my comment below that I made an error in the way I set up that calculation. It should be that the odds of smoking pot is 14 times higher for those who smoke cigs than for those who don't. Instead, I took the *overall* proportion of smoking pot (which is between the proportion in cig smokers and the proportion in those who don't smoke cigs) and multiplied it (or actually its odds) by 14. Oops.

In fact, with a little further Googling, I found that the original study reported a risk ratio of 14 rather than an odds ratio of 14. They found that 84% of cig smokers also smoked marijuana compared to 6% of non-smokers.

No word yet on what I was smoking at the time.

> dont you think its safe to assume all the kids who smoke cigarettes
> smoke weed?

No, I don't. First off, one's an upper, the other's a downer, so they appeal to somewhat different sorts. Secondly, many people will avoid pot because it is illegal and others will avoid tobacco because they think it's bad for you. Third, my experience is that many, many people smoke one substance or the other but not both. Finally, it is rare to see correlations above say .7 or .8 on behavioral measures.

A study">[link] at Columbia University found that high schoolers who smoke tobacco are 14 times more likely to smoke marijuana. That is probably on the odds scale, so 15/85 = 0.18 * 14 = 2.5 : 1 odds of a cig smoker being a weed smoker. 2.5/3.5 = 0.71. So about 71% of high schoolers who smoke cigs if that figure applies to this population. That's impressively high to me, but I suspect there are differences in the populations of the two studies. In fact, if this survey was newsworthy because the prevalence of marijuana use was atypically higher than the prevalence of cigarette smoking, that would tend to imply a weaker association in this population.

In Maine, kids in high school report they have easier access to marijuana than alcohol; in the 11th and 12th grades, they have easier access to marijuana than cigarettes. Yeah prohibition is effective...

> who knew the underground marketing of chronic could
> outweigh the corporate marketing of big tobacco?

Tim Leary.

if 15.5% smoke cigarettes and 16% smoke weed dont you think its safe to assume all the kids who smoke cigarettes smoke weed except for the one who dosent want to smell bad? or was too high to fill out his survey correctly i dont know just a thought

I can just imagine Big Tobacco trying to get a SpongeBob SquarePants tie-in.

Here's hoping they're smoking it neat as well.