University of Michigan researchers at Monitoring the Future, a project studying changes in the beliefs and behavior of young people in the United States, found the use of marijuana declined in 12th, 10th and 8th graders surveyed from 2023 to 2024. Researchers found similar statistics across other areas including vaping and alcohol consumption.
Richard Miech, principal investigator of MTF and research professor at the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that MTF collects data on adolescent drug use through surveys administered to public schools.
“We document which drugs are becoming more popular among teenagers and which drugs are falling out of favor,” Miech said. “The way we do that is we have a list of 60,000 K through 12 schools in the United States and we take a random draw, about 300 to 400 every year and we recruit those schools to participate in our study.”
Marijuana use in all students surveyed in the MTF study dropped, from 29% to 25.8% in 12th graders, 17.8% to 15.9% in 10th graders and 8.3% to 7.2% in 8th graders.
Sarah Stoddard, an associate professor of public health, said in an interview with The Daily that school-administered surveys do not necessarily provide a representative sample, as it excludes homeschooled student populations as well as those who often miss school.
“School-based surveys don’t then capture kids that aren’t in school,” Stoddard said. “Those (kids) could be home-based, home school kids, but those could also be some of our highest risk kids who aren’t in school either at all, or have high chronic absenteeism who might be missed on the days surveys are done.”
Kenneth Warner, School of Public Health professor and dean emeritus, said in an interview with The Daily the low rates of smoking in adolescents according to MTF was surprising, given the previously high rates.
“The starting point for this is recognition that the rate of smoking among kids is essentially almost zero, and it’s getting very close to zero,” Warner said. “That’s something that we never thought was going to happen, at least I didn’t think was going to happen during my lifetime.”
Warner emphasized the importance of the decrease in smoking among children because of the harmful health effects of cigarettes, including cancer.
“Smoking is the most important behavior when it comes to tobacco use, by far,” Warner said. “It’s the most addictive and it’s the most dangerous. There’s nothing that comes close to it. When you smoke a cigarette, you’re inhaling up to 7000 different chemicals, 70 of them are known human carcinogens, causes of cancer in humans … kids used to smoke a lot, and now they’re down to almost nothing.”
While MTF continues to monitor the use of cigarettes and other new drugs, Miech said the substantial decline in cigarette usage of 12th graders, from 35.1% in 1998 to 2.5% in 2024, is a major accomplishment.
“If you ask me, one of the greatest public health accomplishments of this century has been the reduction of smoking and adolescent smoking,” Miech said.
MTF has been conducting surveys for 50 years, beginning in 1975 with research on 12 graders.
Miech said one of the contributing factors to the decrease in drug usage over the past years may be due to the COVID-19 pandemic when students were quarantined at home with less exposure to drugs and peer pressure, leading to a continual decline.
“It made a lot of sense that because of social distancing, drug use went down,” Miech said. “It turns out, not only did those declines post-pandemic stick, but drug use fell even further. It’s kind of a mystery at this point why it’s falling so far. You can speculate, but we have yet to do the formal tests of different hypotheses about why that happened.”
LSA freshman Sana Mohammed said in an interview with The Daily she was surprised to hear about these declining trends because she expected them to increase alongside an increase in rates of reported mental health struggles amongst students.
“I would expect it to increase,” Mohammed said, “I feel like with the pandemic mental health might have decreased. So I feel like people might have been turning to (drugs), but (the survey result) was surprising.”
Stoddard said there may be multiple reasons, including less stigma around mental health, contributing to the lower drug usage.
“I wonder about how (drug usage) might be related to mental health as well,” Stoddard said. “I think we’re seeing much more openness to talking about mental health, addressing mental health concerns. So are we seeing less youth using substances to self medicate.”
Daily Staff Reporter Grace Lee can be reached at graceyl@umich.edu.
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