marijuana use for adolescents and adults alike (Schuermeyer et al., 2014). Conversely, in an analysis of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health 2002–2009 data, Harper and colleagues (2012) found limited evidence for a causal effect of the presence of medical marijuana laws—in 2002–2003 8 states had legalized the use of medical marijuana, whereas in 2007–2008, 13 total states had medical marijuana laws—on measures of reported cannabis use. However, despite extant studies investigating perceived risk surrounding cannabis use (Lopez-Quintero and Neumark, 2010; Kilmer et al., 2007), and annual publications put out by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), to our knowledge, no current research describes temporal changes in perceived risk of cannabis use using the most recent decade of aggregated data of the U.S. population 12 years and older. In particular, this gap includes perceived risk of regular use, temporal changes in frequency of cannabis use, subgroup analyses for each of the aforementioned temporal trends, and characteristics associated with perceived risk of use using a U.S. nationally representative sample.
