Youth marijuana use is stable amid the state legalization movement, despite prohibitionist claims to the contrary. Beyond that, more students are actually saying it’s harder to access cannabis and that they disapprove of occasional use.
During a webinar on Wednesday, federal officials discussed the results of the latest Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey—which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and conducted every year for decades by the University of Michigan.
“Looking at the students reporting use of cannabis in the last year, we didn’t see any statistically significant changes from 2024 to 2025,” NIDA’s Marsha Lopez, chief of the agency’s epidemiology research branch, said.
She added that a separate question on how easy it is for teens to obtain marijuana shows that there’s an “overall trending downward of the perception of availability for cannabis use.”
Notably, the 8th, 10th and 12th grade students involved in the nationally representative survey also indicated that they have a higher perception of health risks associated with occasional cannabis use.
While the data over years shows that there was a “period of decline of the perception of harm,” that’s shifted even as more states have enacted legalization, she said. “That seems to have leveled off or reversed in that trend.”
There was also a “statistically significance increase” in youth disapproval of occasional marijuana use.
In the previous annual survey, NIDA and the University of Michigan inquired about the use of delta-8 THC, a cannabis compound that’s typically associated with synthesizing hemp-derived CBD and sold in a largely unregulated marketplace. This time, researchers asked more broadly about “cannabis products made from hemp” that could include a wider range of novel cannabinoids.
“We’ll see how that evolves in the coming years, particularly with any potential changes around the laws for cannabis made from hemp,” she said. And to that point, while President Donald Trump signed agricultural legislation legalizing hemp during his first term, he also signed a spending bill last year with provisions that effectively reverse that policy. States are also increasingly enacting bans on intoxicating cannabinoid products.
Lopez also flagged that the percentage of students reporting marijuana use “under a doctor’s order in their lifetime” has remained “relatively low” in the years since MTF included that factor in its survey.
According to the latest MTF data, the rate of past-year marijuana use for 12th graders was 25.7 percent, which is relatively consistent with recent years but at its lowest level since 1992. It was the same case with 10th graders, 15.6 percent of whom used marijuana in the last year. Among 8th grade students, 7.6 percent reported past-year cannabis consumption.
For past-month cannabis use, that rate was 17.1 percent for 12th graders, a slight uptick from the prior year but significantly lower than its record high of 37.1 percent in 1978 before any state had legalized cannabis for adult or medical use. For 10th grade students, the rate was 9.4 percent, and for 8th grade it was 4 percent—consistent with recent years.
“We are encouraged that adolescent drug use remains relatively low and that so many teens choose not to use drugs at all,” NIDA Director Nora Volkow said in a press release. “It is critical to continue to monitor these trends closely to understand how we can continue to support teens in making healthy choices and target interventions where and when they are needed.”
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To reform advocates, the results of the survey reinforce the idea that creating a regulatory framework for cannabis where licensed retailers must check IDs and implement other security mechanisms to prevent unlawful diversion is a far more effective policy than prohibition, with illicit suppliers whose products may be untested and where age-gating isn’t a strictly enforced regulation.
To that point, a separate federally funded study out of Canada that was released last month found that that youth marijuana use rates actually declined after the country legalized cannabis.
The study was released about three months after German officials released a separate report on their country’s experience with legalizing marijuana nationwide.
Back in July, federal health data also indicated that while past-year marijuana use in the U.S. overall has climbed in recent years, the rise has been “driven by increases…among adults 26 years or older.” As for younger Americans, rates of both past-year use and cannabis use disorder, by contrast, “remained stable among adolescents and young adults between 2021 and 2024.”
Across the U.S., research suggests that marijuana use by young people has generally fallen in states that legalize the drug for adults.
A report from the advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), for example, found that youth marijuana use declined in 19 out of 21 states that legalized adult-use marijuana—with teen cannabis consumption down an average of 35 percent in the earliest states to legalize. The report cited data from a series of national and state-level youth surveys, including the annual MTF survey.
Another survey from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last year also showed a decline in the proportion of high-school students reporting past-month marijuana use over the past decade, as dozens of states moved to legalize cannabis.
At the state level, MPP’s assessment looked at research such as the Washington State Healthy Youth Survey that was released in April 2024.
That survey showed declines in both lifetime and past-30-day marijuana use in recent years, with striking drops that held steady through 2023. The results also indicated that perceived ease of access to cannabis among underage students has generally fallen since the state enacted legalization for adults in 2012—contrary to fears repeatedly expressed by opponents of the policy change.
In June of last year, meanwhile, the biannual Healthy Kids Colorado Survey found that rates of youth marijuana use in the state declined slightly in 2023—remaining significantly lower than before the state became one of the first in the U.S. to legalize cannabis for adults in 2012.
The findings broadly track with other past surveys that have investigated the relationship between jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana and youth cannabis use.
For example, a Canadian government report recently found that daily or near-daily use rates by both adults and youth have held steady over the last six years after the country enacted legalization.
Another U.S. study reported a “significant decrease” in youth marijuana use from 2011 to 2021—a period in which more than a dozen states legalized marijuana for adults—detailing lower rates of both lifetime and past-month use by high-school students nationwide.
Another federal report published last summer concluded that cannabis consumption among minors—defined as people 12 to 20 years of age—fell slightly between 2022 and 2023.
Separately, a research letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in April 2024 said there’s no evidence that states’ adoption of laws to legalize and regulate marijuana for adults have led to an increase in youth use of cannabis.
Another JAMA-published study earlier that month that similarly found that neither legalization nor the opening of retail stores led to increases in youth cannabis use.
In 2023, meanwhile, a U.S. health official said that teen marijuana use has not increased “even as state legalization has proliferated across the country.”
Another earlier analysis from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that rates of current and lifetime cannabis use among high school students have continued to drop amid the legalization movement.
A separate NIDA-funded study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2022 also found that state-level cannabis legalization was not associated with increased youth use. The study demonstrated that “youth who spent more of their adolescence under legalization were no more or less likely to have used cannabis at age 15 years than adolescents who spent little or no time under legalization.”
Yet another 2022 study from Michigan State University researchers, published in the journal PLOS One, found that “cannabis retail sales might be followed by the increased occurrence of cannabis onsets for older adults” in legal states, “but not for underage persons who cannot buy cannabis products in a retail outlet.”
The trends were observed despite adult use of marijuana and certain psychedelics reaching “historic highs” in 2022, according to separate 2023 data.
Photo courtesy of Max Jackson.
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