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The beverage industry is evolving, as many young people find marijuana a cheaper alternative
Jena, a 27-year-old business operations employee based in Chicago, has consumed alcohol socially for nearly a decade. In recent months, however, she decided it was not worth the calories or hangovers. She switched to cannabis products, and now she smokes marijuana once or twice a week and eats gummy candies with cannabidiol, also known as CBD, a chemical component of marijuana that’s legal and doesn’t intoxicate users.
“I realized that I get zero enjoyment out of drinking and it costs me more money than weed does,” said Jena, who asked to omit her last name because marijuana is not legal where she lives.
The street price for marijuana in Chicago is $18 per gram and the average beer at a bar is $6. Jena said she used to spend $30 to $50 on alcohol in one night, several nights a week, and now spends less than $30 on marijuana a month.
“I definitely enjoy weed better. It’s more relaxing, I don’t have to worry about how I acted the night before, and don’t have to deal with hangovers or throwing up the morning after,” she said.
Nine states and Washington, D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana. Even more states allow products containing CBD, the non-psychoactive component of cannabis that some clinical trials have shown may help with anxiety and muscle pain without making users high.
Although Illinois, where Jena lives, is not one of those states, she said the decriminalization of cannabis in other places in the U.S. has relaxed attitudes around its use in social settings. The majority of the 55 million recreational marijuana users in the U.S. are millennials, according to a 2017 Yahoo News poll. Most millennials use marijuana socially: Only 25% of them smoke alone.
Daily marijuana use among 12th graders increased from 1.9% in 1992 to 5.9% in 2017, the study showed. “For the first time, trends in alcohol and marijuana use are substantially diverging, suggesting that the historical relationship between these two drugs may be changing,” it concluded.
Meanwhile, millennials drink far less alcohol than past generations, an annual national survey of 50,000 adolescents and young adults in America from the Monitoring the Future Study found. The share of college students who drink alcohol daily fell from 4.3% in 2016 to 2.2% in 2017, a more than 4 percentage-point drop from the 6.5% of college students who used alcohol daily in 1980.
Full Article: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mi...oze-2018-09-26
Jena, a 27-year-old business operations employee based in Chicago, has consumed alcohol socially for nearly a decade. In recent months, however, she decided it was not worth the calories or hangovers. She switched to cannabis products, and now she smokes marijuana once or twice a week and eats gummy candies with cannabidiol, also known as CBD, a chemical component of marijuana that’s legal and doesn’t intoxicate users.
“I realized that I get zero enjoyment out of drinking and it costs me more money than weed does,” said Jena, who asked to omit her last name because marijuana is not legal where she lives.
The street price for marijuana in Chicago is $18 per gram and the average beer at a bar is $6. Jena said she used to spend $30 to $50 on alcohol in one night, several nights a week, and now spends less than $30 on marijuana a month.
“I definitely enjoy weed better. It’s more relaxing, I don’t have to worry about how I acted the night before, and don’t have to deal with hangovers or throwing up the morning after,” she said.
Nine states and Washington, D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana. Even more states allow products containing CBD, the non-psychoactive component of cannabis that some clinical trials have shown may help with anxiety and muscle pain without making users high.
Although Illinois, where Jena lives, is not one of those states, she said the decriminalization of cannabis in other places in the U.S. has relaxed attitudes around its use in social settings. The majority of the 55 million recreational marijuana users in the U.S. are millennials, according to a 2017 Yahoo News poll. Most millennials use marijuana socially: Only 25% of them smoke alone.
Daily marijuana use among 12th graders increased from 1.9% in 1992 to 5.9% in 2017, the study showed. “For the first time, trends in alcohol and marijuana use are substantially diverging, suggesting that the historical relationship between these two drugs may be changing,” it concluded.
Meanwhile, millennials drink far less alcohol than past generations, an annual national survey of 50,000 adolescents and young adults in America from the Monitoring the Future Study found. The share of college students who drink alcohol daily fell from 4.3% in 2016 to 2.2% in 2017, a more than 4 percentage-point drop from the 6.5% of college students who used alcohol daily in 1980.
Full Article: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mi...oze-2018-09-26
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