9

Thursday, July 23, 2015

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
NEWS

Study finds medical marijuana users more addicted
High school students 
less likely to become 
hooked on illicit weed

By ALANA WYGANT

Daily Staff Reporter

According to a recent Univer-

sity study, if you use medical mari-
juana and you’re a high school 
student, you are more likely to 
become addicted to the substance 
than from the use of non-medical 
marijuana.

The authors of the study used 

data from another study, Monitor-
ing the Future, an ongoing look at 

drug use among American adoles-
cents.

The study, “Adolescents’ Use of 

Medical Marijuana: A Secondary 
Analysis of Monitoring the Future 
Data,” divided 12th grade adoles-
cents in the data into four groups. 
These four groups were non-mari-
juana users, users who had medi-
cal marijuana papers, users who 
used someone else’s marijuana 
without medical papers, and users 
who obtained marijuana from an 
illicit source — i.e. non-medical 
marijuana.

The study was done in order to 

determine how much the three 
groups smoked when compared 

with each other. The authors of 
the study also wanted to look at 
which of the three marijuana-
using groups tended to use or not 
use other substances.

According to the study, few 

teens 
actually 
get 
marijuana 

directly or illegally from medical 
sources. The vast majority of 12th 
grade marijuana users get the sub-
stance from non-medical, illegal 
sources.

The study found the group of 

non-medical marijuana users were 
the least likely to engage in risky 
behaviors — defined as engaging 
the activities of using the sub-
stance on “40 or more occasions,” 

smoking weed every day, or being 
drunk and using other illegal or 
legal substances — of the three 
marijuana-using groups.

The study also analyzed those 

who said they were addicted to 
marijuana. Carol Boyd, a Universi-
ty professor in the School of Nurs-
ing and one of the authors of the 
study, said the group of medical-
card carrying marijuana users and 
the group of users who obtained 
medical marijuana from someone 
else were both likelier to say they 
were “hooked” than those who 
used illegal marijuana.

“Medical 
users 
were 
10.2-

fold more likely to say they were 

hooked when compared to teens 
who used illicit marijuana,” Boyd 
said. “Diverted medical users were 
6.4- fold more likely to say they 
were hooked when compared to 
teens who used illicit marijuana. 
These increased odds were statis-
tically significant for both groups.”

In the discussion section of 

the study, authors noted some 
research setbacks, one of which 
was that the data only included 
12th grade students who were 
enrolled in school, leaving out 
those unenrolled. 

For deeper understanding, the 

study says more research should 
be done on the topic.

“What is really promising is 

that many...are fierce competi-
tors working side by side to figure 
out this mobility challenge for the 
future,” Steudle said. “At the end of 
the day, there’s still 33,000 Ameri-
cans–motorists–that lost their lives 
last year on highways. The future 
of automated/connected vehicles 
holds the promise to drive those 
numbers down significantly…This 
is the facility that’s gonna help us 
get there.”

In her speech to attendees, con-

gresswoman Debbie Dingell (MI–
12) said connected and autonomous 
vehicles could eliminate 80 percent 
of crash related deaths, according 
to the National Highway Traffic 
Safety Board.

In addition to Mcity’s impact 

on advancements in driver safety, 
Dingell also spoke of the facility’s 
clear benefits to Michigan’s auto 
industry and economy.

In an interview with the Daily, 

Dingell, former president and exec-
utive director of Community Rela-
tions and Government Relations of 
GM, said the research and partner-
ships formed through Mcity will 
keep the latest automotive technol-
ogy within Michigan’s borders.

“Transportation’s always been 

the backbone of Michigan’s econ-
omy, and we don’t want to see the 
cutting edge technology go to any 
other state,” Dingell said. “This is 
what happens when you bring Uni-
versity, business, government, aca-
demia– all together, and you work 
together– you stay at the cutting 
edge.”

In an interview with the Daily, 

senator Gary Peters (D.–Mich.) said 
Michigan’s brand new facility will 
attract top notch transportation 
innovators from all over the U.S.

“Having this track at the Univer-

sity of Michigan– having University 
of Michigan’s leadership– will act 
as a beacon to bring researchers 
from around the country to Michi-
gan to do their work.”

In his address to the audience, 

Peters said Mcity would maintain 
the center of transportation tech-
nology in Michigan, rather than in 
California.

“We are not gonna let Silicon 

Valley take this technology because 
this technology is born at the Uni-
versity of Michigan– born in the 
greater Detroit area, and we’re 
gonna be the global leader of this 
technology that will transform 
mobility,” Peters said.

Peters said he’s been supporting 

Michigan’s transportation research 
in Congress by introducing legis-
lation in the Transportation Bill 
that aims to allow Michigan to 
use federal money for transporta-
tion research, including funding 
for sensors that are crucial to the 
infrastructure technology associ-
ated with automated vehicles. For 
instance, with the development 
of new technology, innovators are 
designing sensors that alert auto-
mated cars of approaching dangers, 
such as a bridge that is icing over.

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D–

Mich.) addressed the fact that, 
although many may find it diffi-
cult to envision a world in which 
cars completely drive themselves, 
Michigan innovators and industry 
experts would show us through 
findings at Mcity that automated 
vehicles have the potential to be 

safer, more efficient and therefore 
more popular than the current 
technology.

She equated the concept of self-

driving cars in the present to Henry 
Ford’s revolutionary idea of replac-
ing horse transportation with auto-
mobiles at the beginning of the 20th 
century.

“At the last century, when Henry 

Ford was first talking about the 
automobile, the horseless carriage, 
and everybody said he was crazy– 
that nothing would replace the 
horse. We’ve been riding horses 
since the dawn of civilization, and 
so nothing was gonna change– 
except the horse,” Stabenow said.

“So this century we’re used to 

driving cars, so it’s very hard to 
imagine that cars will drive us as 
the next innovation.”

Ann Arbor’s Mayor Christopher 

Taylor also spoke to attendees of 
Mcity’s positive impact on the city.

“The Mobility Transportation 

Center Projects– they will play an 
important and critical role in assist-
ing communities like Ann Arbor 
to come up with new solutions for 
congestion, and, most importantly, 
these projects will ensure that our 
community integrates cars, bus-
ses, pedestrians and bicycles into a 
seamless, safe and effective trans-
portation network, and we couldn’t 
be more excited,” Taylor said.

After government officials and 

University administrators formally 
spoke, attendees watched vari-
ous demonstrations of collabora-
tive projects on the Mcity test site. 
One such demonstration was the 
Bosch automatic emergency brak-
ing for pedestrians demonstration, 
in which a radar sensor located 
on the test vehicle recognized an 
approaching cyclist, automatically 

slowing the vehicle to a stop to pre-
vent a collision.

Greg Stevens, Ford’s global man-

ager of automated driving projects, 
represents Ford within the Uni-
versity’s Mobility Transformation 
Center. He said the launch of Mcity 
would greatly benefit Ford because, 
while the company owns and oper-
ates test tracks for improving speed 
and other vehicle features, it does 
not have its own mock city.

“We guide what research top-

ics MTC does, so we contribute 
our experience to say these are the 
types of challenges we would like 
MTC to take on and research, and 
we also benefit from being able to 
use all this infrastructure around,” 
Stevens said.

Stevens added Mcity will help 

Ford develop, in partnership with 
the University, specific technology 
they are currently working on to 
prevent collisions at blind intersec-
tions by equipping cars with mes-
saging systems to automatically 

alert nearby vehicles of their loca-
tion.

Ryan Eustice, an associate pro-

fessor of engineering at the Uni-
versity who has been collaborating 
with Ford, testing automated vehi-
cles, said Mcity is uniquely ben-
eficial to transportation research 
because it allows researchers to 
simulate possible collisions and 
dangerous situations on demand.

Eustice said that, although the 

state of Michigan allows engineers 
to test certain cars on public roads, 
the out-of-the-ordinary accidents 
that automated cars need to learn 
how to detect are fairly rare and 
therefore difficult to gather data 
from.

“We get to be maximally evil 

here to the cars, so we get to cre-
ate a very high density of just weird 
corner cases that you need to deal 
with,” Eustice said.

MCITY
From Page 1

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

