Has Social Media Killed Pot? Teen Marijuana Use at Historic Low

When American teenagers returned to classrooms after the pandemic, Dr. Richard Miech expected marijuana use to return with them.The principal investigator of Monitoring the Future, a national survey that has tracked adolescent drug use for decades, had watched marijuana use fall sharply when schools closed and teenagers were spending less time with friends. He expected the decline to reverse once students were back in school.“I was wrong about that,” Dr. Miech told The New York Sun. “It didn’t. It just continued to decline to my amazement and to the amazement of many people in the field.” It still has not rebounded, even though marijuana legalization has spread throughout the country. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey show marijuana use among high school students at its lowest level in more than three decades. The share reporting current marijuana use has fallen by roughly 60 percent over the past decade, while the share who say they have ever tried marijuana has also reached a record low. The federal 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows the same direction. Among 12 to 17-year-olds, past-year marijuana use fell from 10.9 percent in 2021 to 8.7 percent in 2025. Researchers are increasingly focused not only on why teenagers are using less marijuana, but on why many appear not to be starting at all.In an unpublished analysis now under review, Dr. Miech separated the recent decline into two components: abstention, meaning teenagers who never started using marijuana, and desistance, meaning those who had used it before but stopped.About 72 percent of the decline in past-year marijuana use from 2020 to 2025 was accounted for by an increase in teenagers who had never used marijuana, he found. The remaining 28 percent was accounted for by declining recent use among teenagers who had tried it before.“By far, you know, it’s mostly abstention,” Dr. Miech said. Silvia Martins, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who studies substance use and cannabis policy, said marijuana should not be viewed in isolation.Alcohol and tobacco use among teenagers have also declined, she said, pointing toward a broader shift in how teenagers spend their time and interact with one another.“A lot of their socialization happens online,” Dr. Martins said. That may mean “less opportunities to use drugs, including marijuana.”Teenagers who were in middle school during the pandemic came of age during a period when much of their interaction moved onto phones and social media, she said. They may also be spending more time at home and under greater parental supervision.“I think it’s a shift in overall behavioral norms,” Dr. Martins said.Dr. Miech has arrived at a similar hypothesis.He said teachers and principals have described students spending lunch periods and other downtime looking at phones instead of interacting with classmates. Drug use among adolescents has traditionally been highly social, involving friends, parties and peer pressure.If those interactions are happening less often, he said, opportunities to encounter marijuana may be declining with them.But Dr. Miech cautioned against treating that explanation as settled science.“It’s just a thought. It’s a hypothesis,” he said. “I just don’t know if that’s the real cause or not.” The decline is particularly interesting because it has unfolded as legal marijuana markets for adults have expanded across the country.Researchers once debated whether legalization would lead to more marijuana use among teenagers by increasing availability and normalizing the drug, Dr. Martins said. Some expected adolescent use to rise, while others were skeptical.Nationally, the large increase some researchers feared has not materialized. But the relationship between legalization and teen use is more complicated than the national numbers suggest.A study published this year in JAMA Network Open examined more than 1.3 million confidential cannabis screenings of 13 to 17-year-olds receiving care through Kaiser Permanente Northern California. It found that adolescent cannabis use increased after recreational legalization and continued rising after legal retail sales began, then fell after the Covid-19 pandemic. Cannabis use among those teenagers had been declining for years before California legalized recreational marijuana, falling from about 10 percent in 2011 to 6.8 percent in 2016. After legalization, use began rising and reached about 9.5 percent shortly before the pandemic.That trend did not last. Use dropped sharply during the first year of the pandemic and continued falling, reaching about 6.5 percent by the end of 2024, according to Kelly Young-Wolff, the study’s lead author and a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente. “We can describe the reversal more precisely than we can explain it,” Dr. Young-Wolff said.Reduced time with friends, increased parental supervision and decreased access to marijuana could help explain the initial pandemic-era decline, she said.They are less convincing explanations for what happened next.Those conditions largely disappeared when schools reopened, yet marijuana use remained low.“The steep decline slowed after mid-2021 but did not reverse,” Dr. Young-Wolff said. By December 2024, use in the Northern California population she studied had returned to roughly the level seen before legalization. That persistence, she said, suggests that broader cultural or social changes may be involved.Attitudes toward marijuana may also be changing.Monitoring the Future asks 12th graders whether they believe people put themselves at “great risk” by regularly using marijuana. In 2019, 30 percent said yes. By 2025, 39 percent did, Dr. Miech said as he reviewed the survey’s historical data during an interview.The 2025 level is not unprecedented. The figure was also 39 percent in 2013. But the increase since immediately before the pandemic runs against a simple assumption that legalization would steadily make marijuana seem less risky to teenagers. Dr. Martins said some teenagers may also be hearing more about the higher concentrations of THC found in some modern cannabis products.Yet lower overall use does not necessarily mean marijuana-related risks are disappearing.Dr. Young-Wolff said one of the largest unanswered questions is whether the national decline is masking a split among teenagers: fewer young people trying cannabis at all, while some of those who do use it may be consuming it more frequently, using stronger products or developing cannabis-related problems.Her screening data measured whether teenagers had used cannabis in the previous year, not how often they used it, which products they consumed or their potency. That distinction is important because a falling number of users does not necessarily reveal what is happening among the smaller group that continues to use marijuana.Dr. Miech’s data suggest the recent decline is unusually broad. When he examined marijuana use by sex, region, population density, and race and ethnicity, the downward trend appeared across the groups he reviewed. Eighth, 10th and 12th-graders also moved in the same direction.He described it as a “historical period effect,” something occurring across different groups of adolescents at roughly the same time.“Something about the historical period,” he said, “has led to this decline.” Researchers can now describe that shift with increasing precision. They know marijuana use fell sharply during the pandemic. They know it did not rebound when schools reopened. And new analysis suggests much of the decline is coming from teenagers who never begin using marijuana at all.What they still cannot say with confidence is why this generation is making a different choice.

Has Social Media Killed Pot? Teen Marijuana Use at Historic Low

Has Social Media Killed Pot? Teen Marijuana Use at Historic Low

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