A recent nationwide survey reports that drug use among U.S. teenagers has dropped dramatically, but it may not actually indicate that more youth have begun to embrace abstinence.
In actuality, while it’s true teenagers reported less drug use in the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a combination of environmental factors and the survey’s data reporting methods may create an incomplete narrative, said Terri Powell, an associate professor of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“I really think the pandemic was one of the things that drove the decrease,” Powell said, noting that drugs may have been harder to obtain during COVID-era social restrictions. “And this is self-reported data. So maybe young people are less willing to admit they are using drugs.”
Powell isn’t alone in questioning the validity of self-reporting. Studies have shown that, particularly among young respondents, drug testing reveals a different result than what those surveyed report.
And, even if it’s true that teenagers are using drugs at significantly lower rates, demographic data still paints a mixed picture, with minorities being more likely to use drugs at young ages, she added.
The nationwide survey, conducted in 2023 by researchers at the University of Michigan, surveyed teenagers in 8th, 10th and 12th grades, among other age groups.
It found that 46% of high school seniors said they’d had a drink in the past year, a significant drop from 88% in 1979, The New York Times reported.
In addition, 29% of seniors reported using marijuana in the previous year — down from 51% in 1979.
Local data about teenage drug and alcohol use, however, isn’t as thorough as the national survey.
A lack of up-to-date, detailed data about drug and alcohol use is an ongoing issue, Powell said, and it makes it more difficult to get clear insight into the habits of teenagers.
A spokesperson for the Baltimore City Health Department said they could not immediately provide detailed city-level data, but its website states that half of high school students in the city have tried alcohol, and one in eight teenagers reported binge drinking in the past month.
Statewide data is more readily available than city data, but it’s only as recent as 2021. The numbers come from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That survey shows that reported drug and alcohol use among Maryland teenagers has decreased over the past two decades, mirroring the nationwide trend.
About 19% of teenagers currently drank alcohol as of 2021, a decrease of more than 20 percentage points since 2005.
Current marijuana use decreased by 3.5 percentage points during that period. In addition, cocaine, heroin and meth use decreased by 4, 0.1 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively.
Powell said that she’d be more interested in survey results in the coming years, as the legalization of recreational marijuana in Maryland this past year could make the substance more available to teenagers.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, seemed more willing to take the recent Monitoring the Future survey data at face value while talking to The New York Times about potential reasons for the decrease.
“One major factor is education and prevention campaigns,” Volkow said. “Certainly, the prevention campaign for cigarette smoking has been one of the most effective we’ve ever seen.”
Powell, however, said it isn’t clear how effective education and prevention campaigns are.
For one, she said, many harm reduction campaigns are directed at adults, so teenagers aren’t as exposed to anti-drug messaging from entities such as health departments.
“There isn’t full-on consistency across states around drug and alcohol education,” Powell said. “It may appear in some health programs, it may not. I don’t know that informational campaigns that exist are reaching young people.”
Even if campaigns do exist at the local level, some once-popular initiatives such as D.A.R.E. have been proven largely ineffective with their “just say no” message.
That isn’t to say educational campaigns don’t have merit. But local health programs should instead implement policies using a “multi-pronged approach” that includes the input of families, schools, health departments and doctors, Powell said.
At the end of the day, though, teenagers still are at an age where they are adventurous and often willing to take risks, which include substance use — a curiosity that has become increasingly deadly, she added.
While teenagers are reporting a decrease in drug use, overdose deaths among the youth have soared nationwide.
Fentanyl-related overdose deaths among adolescents doubled between 2019 to 2020 nationwide, and the levels have remained steady in the past few years, The New York Times reported.
“The challenge now is that more substances are lethal,” Powell said. “Now, the first time trying can be the last time trying.”
The Baltimore City Health Department has limited overdose data categorized by age, and its website only shows overdose death data for those 18 to 25 years old.
The data also only dates from 2017 to 2021, but it shows that the number of overdose deaths in that age group doubled between 2019 to 2020, going from 12 to 25.
Similar trends have been seen throughout the state. Overdoses among Maryland residents under 25 years old increased by 50.6% from 2012 to 2021, according to the most recent data available from the Maryland Department of Health.
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