The slow shedding of the stigma around drug-use is clearly having an effect on young people in America.
19 to 30 year-olds are smoking more weed and ingesting more hallucinogenics than any time since 1988, when Monitoring the Future started gathering this data. Each have been on a consistent rise in popularity for ten years now, and it does not seem to be slowing down.
43% of young adults reported marijuana-use, which was up from 34% in 2016, and way up from 29% in 2011.
Interestingly, psychedelics seem to be in the nascent stages of an upswing, with use levels remaining pretty stable for the last decade, until 2020. 8% of young adults reported a use of hallucinogenics in the past year, compared to 5% in 2016 and 3% in 2011.
Alcohol use remains stable with pre-pandemic levels at 32% and cigarette smoking continues its descent in popularity.
For better or for worse, drug-use is becoming more and more a part of life in the US, and in the coming decades, it seems likely that we’ll see how this effects the landscape as the destructive impacts of the War on Drugs continue to get stripped away.
Read more details about the survey at NIH.
