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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.

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