IntroductionIs an illegal substance or a legal substance more harmful to educational attainment? Studies have shown that early marijuana use is correlated with poor academic performance, including high school dropout rates (Verweij, Huizink, Agrawal, Martin, & Lynskey, 2013). The explanation for the dropout rate and poor academic performance is that participation in activities involving smoking marijuana takes the student away from education. Nevertheless, there are cases where students who smoke marijuana or drink alcohol still excel in school and have a high grade point average. Therefore, students' peers play an important role in distancing them from education. If that is the case, what about the student who associates with those students who smoke and drink but are passionate about education? Would they still be deterred from studying to the point that their GPA is low and they drop out of school? With marijuana illegal and alcohol legal, does marijuana or alcohol pose a greater threat to educational attainment? Other studies suggest that alcohol and marijuana were associated with reduced educational attainment, which may be due to common risk factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage (Grant et al., 2012). The study showed that early marijuana and alcohol use were indeed associated with early school dropout and reduced educational attainment over the life course, but there was no significant correlation between early substance use and early school dropout rates. My study aims to determine if educational attainment and substance use play a significant role in educational attainment and what level of education students are most likely to allow alcohol and substance use ...... middle of article ...... erimental Research, 1412-1420.Horwood, JL, Fergusson, DM, Hayabakhsh, MR, Najman, JM, Coffey, C., Patton, GC, . . . Hutchinson, D.M. (2010). Cannabis use and academic achievement: results from three Australasian cohort studies. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 247-253.King, RD & South, SJ (2011). Crime, race, and the transition to marriage. Journal of Family Problems, 32, p. 99-126. doi: 10.1177/0192513X10375059 Verweij, KJ, Huizink, AC, Agrawal, A., Martin, NG, & Lynskey, MT (2013). Is the relationship between early cannabis use and educational attainment causal or due to shared responsibility? Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 580-586.White, J., & Batty, DG (2012). Intelligence throughout childhood in relation to illicit drug use in adulthood: 1970 British cohort study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 767-774.