Intergenerational study finds legalizing recreational cannabis impacts teens differently based on parents' history

According to authors Kerr et al., little research has been conducted so far on the influence of parents on their children’s susceptibility to recreational cannabis legalization (RCL) exposure, no doubt due to “limited data sources collected pre- and post-RCL from youth, much less their parents.” But with a unique set of data, Kerr et al. were able to study whether RCL for adults had an effect on cannabis use among adolescents, and if certain factors made some teens more susceptible to this effect. The researchers pooled data from 940 adolescents who participated in one of three intergenerational studies that took place in three different US states where legalization has gone into effect (in Washington in 2012, in Oregon in 2015, and in New York in 2021), and whose parents had previously participated in a related longitudinal study as children. By combining data from the longitudinal studies with the intergenerational studies, Kerr et al. could examine how the parents’ own upbringing and life experiences affected the onset and development of their children’s drug use. The authors used New York data available from ICPSR in the Rochester Intergenerational Study (RIGS), 1999-2019. Its sample included children of parents originally recruited to the Rochester Youth Development Study Phase 1 Data, 1988-1992 (RYDS). The RIGS data were valuable to Kerr et al. because New York had not yet legalized recreational cannabis during its study period. This allowed the researchers to compare teen cannabis use in states with and without legal recreational cannabis. After analyzing combined data from all six studies, Kerr et al. found that recreational cannabis legalization for adult use was linked to higher adolescent cannabis use, but only among those whose parents had also used cannabis during their own adolescence. The authors suggested that there may be an intergenerational effect, where parents’ past cannabis use could put their own children at higher risk from new environmental factors like RCL.