Young Swedes are drinking less alcohol, but - as Isabella Gripe's doctoral thesis shows - this is not because they have moved onto smoking hash.
By Catarina Thepper for the magazine Medicinsk Vetenskap no 3, 2023.
Unlike in many other countries, 15 and 16-year olds in Sweden use cannabis as neither a substitute for nor a complement to alcohol.
"This means that targeted efforts to reduce drinking levels among young people in Sweden probably have no impact on their use of cannabis, and vice versa," says Isabella Gripe, researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, whose thesis on adolescents and cannabis use in Sweden was published in June.
Gripe had a considerable amount of data to work from. Many people no doubt remember the anonymous survey on drug use that giggling secondary school leavers have been asked to complete every year since 1971. Gripe is also an analyst for the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs (CAN), researching on this very project.
"Swedish adolescents have a more sensible attitude towards smoking and drinking these days," she says. "We often respond with an 'all right, so what do they do instead?', thinking perhaps back to our own teenage years, but it's conceivable that they've simply not substituted the stupidity of the adult generation with anything at all."
According to the figures, which have remained stable at between five and seven per cent over the past two decades, few Swedish 16-year olds try cannabis. Most regular users of cannabis at this age were pupils on upper secondary vocational and introductory programmes.
"Society mustn't let them slip through the net," she says.
Gripe's thesis also addresses an important health aspect for which little data has been available: the association between cannabis and mental distress. One of the studies, conducted using data on Norwegian adolescents, showed that cannabis consumption in the young is associated with symptoms of depression, especially in males.
