Are Drugs More Detrimental to Educational Attainment?

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Introduction
Is an illegal substance or a legal substance more detrimental to educational attainment? Studies have shown that early marijuana use is correlated with poor educational performance including high school drop-out rates (Verweij, Huizink, Agrawal, Martin, & Lynskey, 2013). The explanation for the rate of dropouts and poor education performance is that engaging in activities that involves smoking marijuana, strays the student from education. Nonetheless there are cases where students that do smoke marijuana or drink alcohol still excel in school as well as have a high grade point average therefore the students peers play a big role in the straying that cause them to deter from education. If that is the case what about the student that associates themselves with those students who smoke and drink but are big on education? Would they still be deterred from education to the point where their grade point average is low and they drop out of school? With marijuana being illegal and alcohol being legal does marijuana or alcohol pose a bigger threat to educational attainment? Other studies suggest that alcohol and marijuana was associated with reduced educational attainment which can be due to the common risk factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage (Grant , et al., 2012). The study showed that early marijuana and alcohol use did have an association with early school dropout and reduced lifetime educational attainment however there was not a significant correlation for early substance use and early school dropout rate.
My study is to find out whether educational attainment and substance use plays a significant role in educational attainment and what education level are the students more likely to let the use of alcohol and ma...

... middle of paper ...

...erimental Research, 1412-1420.
Horwood, J. L., Fergusson , D. M., Hayabakhsh, M. R., Najman, J. M., Coffey, C., Patton, G. C., . . . Hutchinson, D. M. (2010). Cannabis use and educational achievement: Findings from three Australasian cohort studies. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 247-253.
King, R. D. & South, S. J. (2011). Crime, Race, and the Transition to Marriage. Journal of Family Issues, 32, p. 99-126. doi: 10.1177/0192513X10375059
Verweij, K. J., Huizink, A. C., Agrawal, A., Martin, N. G., & Lynskey, M. T. (2013). Is the relationship between early-onset cannabis use and educational attainment causal or due to common liability? Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 580-586.
White, J., & Batty, D. G. (2012). Intelligence across childhood in relation to illegal drug use in adulthood: 1970 Britsih Cohort Study. Jornal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 767-774.

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