Even as more and more U.S. states are legalizing cannabis, the current and lifetime rates of cannabis use among American high school students continue to decline, as shown by recently released federal data.
The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published recently, reveals that adolescent consumption of all monitored substances – including cannabis, alcohol, and prescription drugs – has “decreased linearly” over the last decade.
Regarding cannabis, the federal study shows that high school student consumption tended to increase between 2009 and 2013, before legal cannabis dispensaries began to open their doors in the first states to legalize, but has generally been declining since.
The first laws legalising cannabis in the United States were approved by voters in 2012, and regulated retail sales began in 2014.
The latest data from the biannual survey show that 15.8% of high school students reported having used cannabis at least once in the past 30 days in 2021, down from 21.7% in 2009 and significantly less than the peak of 23.4% reached in 2013.
Health authorities have been encouraged by this trend, although they have emphasized that social isolation policies resulting from the coronavirus pandemic have likely played a role in the extent of the decline in substance abuse among young people during the most recent two-year period that was measured.
“Substance use among young people has declined over the past decade, including during the COVID-19 pandemic,” indicates a complementary report from the CDC.
“The expansion of policies, programs, and practices that are adapted and based on evidence aimed at reducing factors that contribute to the risk of psychoactive substance use among adolescents and promoting factors that protect against the risk could help consolidate recent declines,” the report states.
In 2021, a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine showed that state-level cannabis legalization is not associated with an increase in youth consumption.
The study demonstrated that “young people who spent more of their adolescence under legalization were no more or less likely to have used cannabis by age 15 than teenagers who spent little or no time under legalization.”
Another study funded by the federal government and carried out by researchers from Michigan State University, published last summer in the PLOS One journal, found that “retail cannabis sales could be followed by an increase in the onset of cannabis use among older adults” in legal states, “but not among minors who cannot purchase cannabis products at a retail outlet.”
Further studies published by Colorado authorities in 2020 showed that cannabis use among young people in that state “has not changed significantly since legalization” in 2012, although the methods of consumption are diversifying.
