What drives abstinent adolescents to use cannabis? The team of Marie-Pierre Sylvestre, professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal, wanted to find out by conducting a study, the results of which were published in the scientific journalAddiction.This work is based on data from the Quebec portion of the COMPASS study, a Canadian longitudinal study on the health behaviors of high school students.
The analyzes focus on 1,768 students from 11 schools in Quebec followed between 2017 and 2019, all of whom were not cannabis users at baseline. The team examined the extent to which two factors, having friends who use cannabis and perceiving cannabis as easy to obtain, contribute to this shift.
The results show that the two factors act in synergy. Having friends who use cannabis without perceiving cannabis as accessible does not significantly increase the risk of consuming it in turn.
On the other hand, believing that cannabis is easy to obtain, even without friends who use it, already increases the risk significantly. It is the combination of the two that has the most marked effect: a difference in risk of 21.6 percentage points compared to young people without friends who use cannabis and who perceive access to cannabis as difficult.
“Adolescents who had friends who used cannabis and who perceived cannabis as easy to obtain had the highest probability of experimenting with it,” summarizes Marie-Pierre Sylvestre, lead author of the study.