Exploring a broad range of factors has identified similarities and inconsistencies with the existing literature. Frequent childhood religious attendance, associated with reduced likelihood of cannabis use opportunity, was consistent with existing literature (Chen et al., 2004). In contrast to prior literature (Miller et al., 2000) this protective effect did not extend to dependence. Depressive episode was associated with increased speed of transition to dependence, which is consistent with emerging findings of an association between depression and cannabis use disorders (Feingold et al., 2015; Pacek et al., 2013), but was not found to be associated with earlier opportunity to use cannabis. This may be due to the age of depressive episode onset occurring after age of cannabis use opportunity for the majority of participants. Previous research has reported that childhood adversity and sexual abuse are associated with other drug use opportunity and cannabis dependence (Benjet et al., 2013; Duncan et al., 2008) but, while the present analyses identified an association between childhood sexual abuse and earlier cannabis use opportunity, there was no association between childhood sexual abuse and progression from opportunity
