UC San Diego

Purpose

We aimed to examine the availability of medical marijuana dispensaries, price of medical marijuana products, and variety of medical marijuana products in school neighborhoods and their associations with adolescents' use of marijuana and susceptibility to use marijuana in the future.

Methods

A representative sample of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (N = 46,646) from 117 randomly selected schools in California participated in the cross-sectional 2015-2016 California Student Tobacco Survey (CSTS). Characteristics of medical marijuana dispensaries in California were collected and combined with school locations to compute availability, price, and product variety of medical marijuana in school neighborhoods. Multilevel logistic regressions with random intercepts at school level were conducted to test the associations, accounting for individual and school socioeconomic characteristics.

Results

The distance from school to the nearest medical marijuana dispensary (within 0- to 1-mi and 1- to 3-mi bands) was not associated with adolescents' use of marijuana in the past month or susceptibility to use marijuana in the future, nor was the weighted count of medical marijuana dispensaries within the 3-mi band of school. Neither the product price nor the product variety in the dispensary nearest to school was associated with marijuana use or susceptibility to use. The results were robust to different specifications of medical marijuana measures.

Conclusions

There was no evidence supporting the associations of medical marijuana availability, price, or product variety around school with adolescents' marijuana use and susceptibility to use.