Teen Cannabis Use Just Hit an All-Time Low, Even as More States Legalize

Here's a number worth adding to the record books. The share of American high schoolers using cannabis is now the lowest ever recorded, and it happened during the same years the country kept legalizing weed for adults.

The finding comes from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a major federal study run every two years, with the latest results released Monday (yesterday). It shows that 12.9% of high school students currently use cannabis, meaning they'd used it at least once in the previous 30 days. Rewind to 2011, the year before the first states legalized recreational marijuana, and that figure was 23.1%. So teen use hasn't crept up as legalization has spread. It's been cut nearly in half, down about 44%.

The decline is still going too. The last version of this CDC data in 2023 put current teen use at 17%. It's dropped more than four points since. And it's not just current use. The share of high schoolers who have ever tried cannabis fell from 39.9% in 2011 to 25.5% last year.

The prediction that didn't come true

This lands squarely against the argument opponents leaned on for years, that legalizing weed for adults would send kids' use soaring. The data keeps showing the reverse. NORML's Paul Armentano said claims tying adult-use legalization to more teen use are "simply not backed by reliable data," and argued the findings should reassure lawmakers that cannabis can be regulated without pulling young people in.

One data point in a wall of them

What makes this hard to dismiss is that it doesn't stand alone. It fits a large and remarkably consistent body of research.

A separate federal survey released in July, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, found past-year use among 12-to-17-year-olds dropped from 14.2% in 2011 to 8.7% now. An analysis from the Marijuana Policy Project found youth use fell in 19 of the 21 states that legalized, down an average of 35% in the earliest states to do so. The NIDA-supported Monitoring the Future survey found teen use holding stable as legalization expanded. Studies out of Canada found youth use declined after national legalization there. And multiple papers published by the medical journal JAMA concluded that neither legalization nor the opening of retail stores drove up youth cannabis use. Different surveys, different countries, different methods, all pointing the same way.

This article is based on reporting by Tom Angell for Marijuana Moment, covering data from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Read the original coverage at marijuanamoment.net.

Our take

The fear that just fell apart

For decades, the single most powerful argument against legalizing cannabis was some version of "think of the kids." It was the emotional trump card, the thing that ended debates before they started. And now we have a decade-plus of hard federal data saying that as legalization rolled out across the country, teen use didn't rise. It fell to the lowest level anyone has ever measured. That's not a small win, it’s the ground shifting under the entire prohibition argument.

Why it's actually happening

Zoom out and the reason it happened is actually kind of beautiful in its simplicity. A licensed dispensary checks IDs. A drug dealer doesn't. When you pull cannabis out of the shadows and put it behind a regulated counter with age limits and real consequences for selling to minors, you make it harder for kids to get, not easier. Prohibition handed the whole market to people who never asked for a birth date. Legalization is quietly undoing that. The thing critics swore would endanger kids turns out to protect them better than the old way ever did.

The bigger picture

None of this means the work is done. The teenagers who do use today are navigating stronger products than the weed of 2011. On top of that, the honest education still matters for the kids who don't get the message from a statistic. But the trend line is unmistakable and it keeps getting stronger with every new survey. The bigger picture here is that the scariest story ever told about legalization has quietly fallen apart, and the data did it. As more states weigh reform and more of this evidence piles up, that old fear has less and less to stand on. This is what winning the argument actually looks like. Not a shouting match, just a number that keeps going the right direction, year after year. Follow FSOTD for new exclusive podcast episodes and more updates directly from the culture.