Teens Who Vape E-cigarettes More Likely to Consume Cannabis

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]T[/dropcap]eenage high school students who said they experimented with vaping e-cigarettes as freshman were over three times more likely to try cannabis by their junior year, according to recent findings.

The study was published in the journal Pediatrics on Aug. 6. It is titled “Adolescent E-Cigarette, Hookah, and Conventional Cigarette Use and Subsequent Marijuana Use”.

For the study, 2,668 students were surveyed. The students were selected from 10 public high schools in the Los Angeles beginning in fall 2013, at age 14 years old and in ninth grade. The students were asked about cigarette use, vape use and hookah use.

During the fall of 2015, the students completed a follow-up survey while they were in the 11th grade and 16 years old. They were asked is they’ve tried smokable, vaped or edible cannabis products. According to the researchers, teens who previously experimented with vaping tobacco or smoking tobacco with a hookah were three times as likely to try cannabis products.  “For each additional tobacco product used at baseline, adolescents had 3.5 times–greater odds of initiating marijuana use in the last 24 months,” researchers wrote.

Janet Audrain-McGovern is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “When we were thinking about this topic, we were kind of just reflecting on the fact that we have more tobacco products on the market now than ever,” said Audrain-McGovern. “And we’ve seen cigarette smoking decline among young people, but we’ve seen increase in use of these other tobacco products. At the same time, we’ve also seen in many areas of the country a lessening of the restrictions surrounding marijuana use.”

Researchers not involved in the study warned that the correlation isn’t necessarily “causal.” Tobacco and cannabis can be consumed in the same ways, so it shouldn’t exactly come a surprise that the same people are attracted to both. Often the two are mixed, such as in blunt wraps or in a hookah.

According to the study authors, 11 percent of high schoolers now use e-cigarettes and could me more prone to try cannabis later on.