Once high school students start to use marijuana, a new University of Waterloo study has found, their grades suffer and they become less interested in scholarly pursuits.
The study is based on a survey of more than 25,000 students from across Canada.
It found that students who start using marijuana at least once a month end up skipping class and failing to do their homework more often than students not using marijuana – even if they hadn’t been doing those things before.
Additionally, students who used marijuana were found to be about half as likely as other students to get high marks, and significantly less like to value getting good marks.
“The findings support the importance of preventing and delaying the initiation of marijuana use among adolescents,” Scott Leatherdale, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Public Health and Health Systems, said in a news release.
The study also found that students say they are less interested in pursuing a university education after they start using marijuana. The same effect was not found in students when they start using alcohol.
Leatherdale and his team say it is important to understand the effects of marijuana on young Canadians particularly because of the federal government’s plan to legalize the drug in 2018.
The study was published in the Journal of School Health.
