• Posted December 18, 2024

U.S. Teen Drug, Alcohol Use Remains at Low Levels

Rates of vaping, drug and alcohol use among American teens plummeted during the pandemic and have remained at relatively low levels ever since, new government statistics show.

“This trend in the reduction of substance use among teenagers is unprecedented,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, who directs the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “We must continue to investigate factors that have contributed to this lowered risk of substance use to tailor interventions to support the continuation of this trend.”

The new data comes from NIDA's web-based Monitoring the Future survey of teens, with responses up to June of 2024. The survey tracks the self-reported behaviors of kids in the 8th, 10th and 12th grades nationwide.

As might have been expected, forced out of school and quarantined at home, many teens stopped using drugs and alcohol during the 2020-2021 pandemic years, the data showed.

The good news is that numbers have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

In fact, use of alcohol and various drugs by American teens has either held steady or dipped slightly, the survey found.

Some of the main findings:

• Alcohol. About 12.9% of eighth graders said they drank at least once over the past year, a number thats largely unchanged from the year before. Among 10th graders, use actually fell from 30.6% in 2023 to 26.1% in 2024, and among 12th graders, past-year alcohol intake dropped from 45.7% in 2023 to 41.7% this year.

• Vaping. Nicotine vaping rates among 8th graders held steady from 2023 to 2024, at about 9.6%, and for 12th graders the rate of nicotine vape use was stable at about 21%. Tenth graders even experienced a slight decline in past-year nicotine vaping rates -- from 17.6% in 2023 to 15.4% by 2024.

• Cannabis. Again, rates of use of any kind of marijuana (vapes, joints, gummies) have stabilized for 8th graders, with only 7.2% reporting use over the past year. Rates of weed use declined among 12th graders -- from 29% in 2023 to 25.8% this year. When it came to vaped weed, specifically, rates of past-year use held steady among 8th graders (5.6%), 10th graders (11.6%) and 12th graders (17.6%).

• Illicit drugs other than marijuana. Self-reported past-year use of these drugs fell considerably among 8th graders (from 4.6% in 2023 to 3.4% in 2024), and remained stable among 10th graders (4.4%) and 12th graders (6.5%), the data showed. That continues a longstanding trend of kids migrating away from "hard" drugs, NIDA said. This included a continued decline in use of narcotics such as Percocet, Vicodin and Oxycontin, the research team found.

Overall, the kids are alright: The NIDA data shows 89.5% of eighth graders saying that over the past month they've stayed away from marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine.

There was a slight uptick in past-month use of these substances for 10th graders (from 76.9% in 2023 to 80.2% in 2024) and 12th graders (from 62.6% in 2023 to 67.1% a year later).

The overall news is good, however.

“Kids who were in eighth grade at the start of the pandemic will be graduating from high school this year, and this unique cohort has ushered in the lowest rates of substance use we’ve seen in decades,” Richard Miech, team lead of the Monitoring the Future survey, said in the release.

More information

Find out more about how you can shield your kids from substance misuse at the SAMHSA National Helpline

SOURCE: National Institute on Drug Abuse, news release, Dec. 17, 2024