by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
You’re probably not going to believe my take on this, but frankly, I don’t care.
In 1992, 51 percent of 12th-graders said they had drunk alcohol in the past 30 days, a number that had dwindled to 29 percent in 2019. On the flipside, marijuana smoking by high school seniors over a 30-day period surged from 12 percent to 22 percent in the same period.
That is a net loss of 22% for alcohol and a 10% increase for cannabis consumption.
Guess what: No matter how you slice it this is a major positive change.
First, it’s a net 12% decrease for consumption of intoxicants in general, assuming that other possible selections remained the same (likely reasonable, but not possible to know from these statistics.) No matter how you slice it if 12% of teens aren’t using any intoxicant that’s a net positive.