Pothead parents may pass on their poor habits to their progeny
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Publicly released:
2019-11-23 03:00
You might be telling your kids to do as you say, not as you do, but US researchers have found an association between parents that smoke pot and an increased risk of their kids smoking tobacco or marijuana, or drinking, and taking opioids. The team surveyed close to 25,000 mother-child or father-child pairs living in the same home, and found a potential effect on both adolescent and young adults for smoking or opioids, and alcohol by just the adolescents. The team believes screening household members for substance use and counselling parents on risks posed by current and past marijuana use may be helpful in the effort to prevent a cycle of multigenerational substance use.
Journal/conference: JAMA Network Open
Link to research (DOI): 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.16015
Organisation/s: Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
Funder: This study was jointly sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Media Release
From: JAMA
Is Parents’ Use of Marijuana Associated With Greater Likelihood of Kids’ Substance Use
Bottom Line: Recent and past use of marijuana by parents was associated with increased risk of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol use by adolescent or young adult children living in the same household in this survey study. Researchers examined data for 24,900 parent-child pairs from National Surveys on Drug Use and Health from 2015-2018. Parental marijuana use was a risk factor for marijuana and tobacco use by adolescent and young adult children and for alcohol use by adolescent children when researchers accounted for a variety of potential family and environmental factors. When those factors were considered, parental marijuana use wasn’t associated with opioid misuse by their children. The study has limitations, including that the surveys cannot provide a complete picture of family substance use.
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