Maria Melchior, Research Director at Inserm (Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health, Inserm-Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris) and her French and North American colleagues, wanted to study the existence of a possible relationship between early initiation (before age 17) to the consumption of cannabis and the level of study attained later (whether or not to obtain the baccalaureate).
The researchers reached several conclusions:
• By taking into account the age and sex of the participants, compared to non-cannabis users, early adopters have a higher probability of not exceeding the baccalaureate.
• Young people who started using cannabis after 17 years of age have a level of education comparable to non-users.
• Early cannabis use and educational attainment appear to be more strongly associated with young girls than with young boys.
Decreased motivation and concentration
For Maria Melchior and her co-authors, “the early consumption of cannabis can therefore induce educational difficulties, resulting in the long term in a lower level of education than that obtained by young non-users, and this regardless of the social background considered, the psychological or educational difficulties of young people “.
The mechanisms by which early cannabis use affects educational outcomes may relate to the decreased motivation or to memorization problems and concentration, among others, explain the researchers.
In a context where in France one in ten college students (one in five in 3rd) and nearly one in two high school students has already experimented with cannabis, raising the age of initiation of the use of this product is a major public health objective, they also believe.
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