US teen drug, alcohol and tobacco use continues to decline
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Record numbers of teens now abstain, a trend starting during the Covid pandemic and continuing to the present. Drug and alcohol use among teenagers has continued to decline, according to a new study, continuing a downward trend observed at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Record numbers of teens are abstaining from drugs, alcohol and tobacco, according to a survey from Monitoring the Future, an ongoing project at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center. The survey, conducted annually since 1975, released its latest findings based on responses from about 24,000 students in grades 8, 10 and 12 across the US.
“We really expected that once the social distancing policies were lifted, that things would kind of return to their pre-pandemic levels, but that’s not what happened,” said Richard Miech, a researcher for Monitoring the Future. “We found that drug use not only stayed low, but it’s dropped even further.”.
The results show that a whopping 66% of 12th graders reported no use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. This is the highest abstinence rate recorded since the survey began tracking it in 2017. Among 10th graders, 80% reported abstaining, marking another record. For 8th graders, 90% reported no recent use, maintaining the same level as in the previous survey.
The decrease in drug usage during the pandemic was somewhat of a surprise to experts. With the lockdowns causing depression rates to rise dramatically, an increase in drugs and drinking wouldn’t have been too much of a shock. But as the biggest factor in drug use for young people is peer pressure, the lockdowns had the opposite effect.
