The use of licit and illicit drugs by American teens show that some important improvements are taking place, this according to the results from the latest national survey in the Monitoring the Future series.
The use of alcohol and cigarettes reached their lowest points since 1975 when the study began. use of some especially dangerous illicit drugs — such as MDMA (ecstasy, Molly), heroin, amphetamines and synthetic marijuana — also showed a drop in use this year. However, use of Marijuana remained the same.
The study tracks the trends in substance use by polling over 40,000 8th, 10th, and 12th-graders each year in about 400 public and private secondary schools across the contiguous 48 states.
Alcohol
Use of alcohol by U.S. teens continued it’s long-term decline. Those in grades 8, 10, and 12 displayed a further decline in the proportion of students reporting any alcohol use in the year preceding the survey.
“The recent peak rate in annual prevalence of alcohol use was in 1997, at 61% for the three grades combined. Since then, there has been a fairly steady downward march in alcohol use among adolescents,” said Professor Lloyd Johnston, the study’s principal investigator. “The rate has fallen by about a third, to 40%. More importantly, the percentage who report binge drinking has fallen by half, from 22% to 11%.”
Some 12th-graders drink even more heavily than five or more drinks in a row, reporting 10 or more, or 15 or more, drinks in a row on at least one occasion in the prior two weeks—dangerously high levels of consumption that the investigators have labeled “extreme binge drinking.”
Peer disapproval of binge drinking had been rising since 2000 among teens, though it did not rise further in 2015. Declines in availability may be another contributing factor to the declines in teen drinking.
“In recent years, there has been a fair decline in all three grades in the proportion saying that alcohol is easy for them to get, with the steepest decline among the youngest teens,” Johnston said. “This suggests that state, community and parental efforts have been successful in reducing underage access to alcohol.”
Illicit Drugs
Multiple illicit drugs dropped in use this year.
There were declines in use of MDMA (ecstasy, Molly), heroin, synthetic marijuana (“K2,” “Spice”) and amphetamines.
Investigators say there were no statistically significant increases for any of the more than 50 classes and subclasses of drugs that MTF tracks among 8th, 10th and 12th-grade students.
The use of MDMA, known as ecstasy and more recently Molly, has been tumbling in use since around 2010. Inclusion of Molly in the question about perceived risk to the user produced a considerable jump in the proportions of 8th and 10th-graders saying MDMA use is dangerous to the user.
Reported availability of ecstasy (MDMA), specifically, has been declining since the peak year of use in 2001, but there was little further decline in 2015.
Heroin, which is one of the most dangerous illicit drugs, is of particular importance. The amount of secondary school students using heroin has been declining steadily in the past few years, and it continued to fall a little in somewhere grades in 2015.
Among 8th-graders, the proportion reporting any heroin use in the prior 12 months fell significantly from 0.5% to 0.3%; and their annual prevalence is down by two-thirds since 2008, when it was 0.9%.
In both 10th and 12th grades, annual prevalence fell in 2015 by one-tenth of 1% to 0.5% (not a statistically significant change, but the decline for the three grades combined was significant). Both of these upper grades did have an annual prevalence above 1.0% at the beginning of the 2000s, so their rates of heroin use have now fallen by more than half.
This years improvements were almost entirely in taking heroin using a needle, which is the most dangerous form of use. There was little change in the taking of heroin without a needle.
Synthetic marijuana has been sold over the counter in multiple states — notably in gas stations, convenience stores and head shops. It is often imported from overseas and can be very potent and unpredictable both in its chemical content and in its effects, resulting in a number of emergency room admissions.
Use fell by a statistically significant amount in 2015 for the three grades combined. The proportions saying they used any synthetic marijuana in the past 12 months now stand at 3%, 4% and 5% in grades 8, 10 and 12, respectively—down substantially from the 4%, 9% and 11% observed in those same grades in 2012.
“While there has been some increase in the proportion of students seeing use of this drug as dangerous, it hardly seems enough to account for the considerable declines in use, which leads us to conclude that efforts to reduce availability have been successful to some degree,” Johnston said.
“Efforts at the federal and state levels to close down the sale of these substances appear to be having an effect,” Johnston said.
The use of amphetamines also showed some decline in 2015.
While the fall in annual prevalence for the three grades combined from 6.6% to 6.2% did not reach statistical significance, the decline in past 30-day prevalence from 3.2% to 2.7% did, suggesting that the decline is fairly recent. Reported availability of amphetamines has been in decline in all three grades for some years.
Among the many other drugs covered in the study, none showed significant increases or decreases in use this year. A number already have shown appreciable declines in use in the past, such as “bath salts,” LSD, other hallucinogens, salvia, crack, methamphetamine and inhalants.
The most widely used of all the illicit drugs, marijuana, showed no significant changes in annual prevalence this year in any of the three grades, separately or combined.
While the use of pot rose for several years, the annual prevalence of marijuana has essentially leveled out since around 2010.
This year, 12% of 8th-graders, 25% of 10th-graders and 35% of 12th-graders reported using marijuana at least once in the past year.
However, their daily or near-daily marijuana use (defined as smoking marijuana on 20 or more occasions in the past 30 days) is of more importance. These rates stand at 1.1%, 3% and 6% in 8th, 10th and 12th grades, respectively.
In other words, one in every 16 or 17 high school seniors is smoking marijuana daily or near daily. While these rates have changed rather little since 2010, they are from three-to-six times higher than they were at their low point in 1991.
Teens using cigarettes also reached an all-time low in 2015.