Prevention Research Center - Environmental Approaches to Health

“It Just Depends on the Environment”: Patterns and Decisions of Substance Use and Co-Use by Adolescents

August 7, 2019

Marijuana leaf and beer glass — Graphic based upon screen capture from “Weed vs. Alcohol: The Rubin Report” (2015).

Using in-depth interviews with 13 adolescents (16-19 years of age) who used alcohol and marijuana, this study examines the role that social and physical contexts play in adolescent decision-making about simultaneous use of alcohol and marijuana.

The research findings show that context matters in three ways:

context characteristics inform decisions about simultaneous use,
context characteristics determine simultaneous use patterns such as the sequence in which substances were used, and
simultaneous alcohol and marijuana use occurred in both destination locations and transitional locations.

First, researchers found that adolescents described decisions about which substance to use – or both together – based on how the physiological effects of the substance would fit with the social, physical, and situational characteristics of the context.

For example, marijuana was named as a substance that could be used in situations during which youth had to maintain control or where they were likely to encounter authority figures.

Editorial by Raul Caetano Cited in Mother Jones

March 10, 2019

From Mother Jones:

“It would be interesting if they came to the United States and tried to force the United States to change the consumption of alcohol beverages in sports stadiums,” says Raul Caetano, a Brazilian native and senior research scientist for the NIH-funded Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Oakland, California. Caetano, who wrote an editorial about Brazil’s World Cup alcohol conflict for the journal Addiction, says that if FIFA tried to get US alcohol laws changed as a condition of hosting the World Cup—for instance, demanding the drinking age be reduced to 18 for the games—the public health establishment would make sure it didn’t happen. But countries like Brazil and Russia, which struggle to regulate alcohol, don’t have nongovernment institutions to fight back against FIFA and its beer sponsor, he adds.”