Kids Aren't Doing Drugs Anymore
AJMC - Adolescent drug use in the US has continued to drop or remain stable in 2024, extending unprecedented declines that began during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey.
The MTF survey collected data from over 24,000 students in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades across 272 schools, ensuring a nationally representative sample. Conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the survey found that abstention rates from alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine reached record highs among these age groups this year.
Notably, 67% of 12th graders, 80% of 10th graders, and 90% of 8th graders reported no past 30-day use of these substances. In 2017, these rates were 53%, 69%, and 87%, respectively, marking significant improvements for older high schoolers and defying expectations from researchers.
“I expected adolescent drug use would rebound at least partially after the large declines that took place during the pandemic onset in 2020, which were among the largest ever recorded,” said Richard Miech, PhD, team lead of the MTF study at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. “Many experts in the field had anticipated that drug use would resurge as the pandemic receded and social distancing restrictions were lifted. As it turns out, the declines have not only lasted but have dropped further.”
Nancy Reagan must be rolling in her grave. After all the tireless work the throat goat put forth with her "Just Say No" campaign in the 80's to make drugs as cool as possible. After all the dime bags of crack she personally cooked up on the White House stove and hand delivered to black neighborhoods across America. After all the people they sent to prison for the better part of their lives for having an eight of mids in a school zone. After all the D.A.R.E. classes that taught children the proper way to ingest their substance of choice. All that effort just to have the government go soft on non-violent drug offenders and legalize marijuana in states across the county. Effectively erasing all the hard work she did to paint drugs in the most enticing light possible. Now the kids are sober. Hope you're happy Joe Biden.
Sorry I'm not even sure where I was going with that paragraph. My joke of a point didn't really come together the way I hoped. But maybe there's something about the legalization/commercialization of marijuana that makes it less "cool", which results in kids wanting to smoke less. Maybe kids don't find Snoop Dogg as cool as they used to. There's certainly less of a stigma around it. Parents are definitely smoking more openly nowadays. If I grew up with parents who smoked weed and were super annoying about it I'd probably be turned off to it. But I'd think that would be outweighed by the fact that it's SO MUCH easier to obtain & smoke nowadays.
I always think about how much easier my life would have been if vape pens existed when I was in high school. If I could have kept a tiny device in my pocket and at anytime just ducked into a bathroom. Instead of shadily sneaking out of school at lunch to smoke in a car and returning to class smelling deeply of Mediterranean Lavender Febreze. Or making a vaporizer out of a clothes iron, a pop can, and a pen to smoke weed in our hotel room on hockey trips (I'm still proud of that one). Or every time we piled into a car with 4 other people and cruised the streets of Bowling Green listening to Paper Planes by M.I.A. The Bowling Green Bobcats high school golf team was decimated by that. We could have won state that year. But 2 of our top 6 golfers were caught by cops smoking weed in the Stone Ridge parking lot and were kicked off the team. It was brutal. Especially because I had thrown down on the sack they got busted with. I wasn't even in the car that night. Then I got called up to varsity, which I should NOT have been that year. I lost our team a chance at state and was out $20.
Today's kids have no idea what we used to put ourselves through to smoke weed. In hindsight, that's what made it so fun. But it sucked at the time. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm almost insulted that kids aren't doing drugs anymore. We put our futures on the line so one day they'd be free to make the same bad choices we did without threat of consequence. And now they're just going to abstain? Because of what, their futures? Because they'd rather live life with a clear head instead of spending their formative years as complacent zombies? Lame ass kids.
It's probably fentanyl's fault more than anything. Instant death was never on the table when I was a kid. This single picture has probably done more to keep kids off drugs than Just Say No & D.A.R.E. combined.
Back in my day, if you were going to O.D. you'd have to earn it. Nowadays, if you so much as touch a drug that was ever in the same room as fentanyl, you're dead. I know I'm kinda talking about two different things here. People don't really have to worry about their weed being laced with fentanyl. But it all falls under the drugs umbrella. In general, drugs are scarier now than they've ever been. I never saw videos like this growing up.
Even the weed is way stronger. Maybe that's it. It just puts you on your ass too much to be enjoyable. I used to smoke in the morning and have a full-ass day. With the good weed that's on the market now, I'm not sure 16-year old me would have been able to handle it. 32-year old me can't even smoke without spending an hour contemplating every decision I've ever made.
Whatever it is, kids don't seem to be doing drugs at the rate they used to. At least according to those anonymous "how much drugs do you do" surveys they pass out in school. The one's where you mark that you're a 6-foot-5, 300 pound Pacific Islander who does angel dust 30+ times per week. So assuming those are accurate, I suppose kid's doing less drugs is a good thing. I'm not completely sold that locking yourself in your room and scrolling TikTok until your eyes bleed is any better for your brain than smoking weed. Or crack. But apparently that's the direction society is headed.