Youth marijuana use is stable amid the state legalization movement, despite prohibitionist claims to the contrary. Beyond that, more students are actually saying it’s harder to access cannabis and that they disapprove of occasional use.
During a webinar on Wednesday, federal officials discussed the results of the latest Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey—which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and conducted every year for decades by the University of Michigan.
“Looking at the students reporting use of cannabis in the last year, we didn’t see any statistically significant changes from 2024 to 2025,” NIDA’s Marsha Lopez, chief of the agency’s epidemiology research branch, said.
Youth marijuana use is stable amid the state legalization movement, despite prohibitionist claims to the contrary. Beyond that, more students are actually saying it’s harder to access cannabis and that they disapprove of occasional use.
During a webinar on Wednesday, federal officials discussed the results of the latest Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey—which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and conducted every year for decades by the University of Michigan.
“Looking at the students reporting use of cannabis in the last year, we didn’t see any statistically significant changes from 2024 to 2025,” NIDA’s Marsha Lopez, chief of the agency’s epidemiology research branch, said.
She added that a separate question on how easy it is for teens to obtain marijuana shows that there’s an “overall trending downward of the perception of availability for cannabis use.”
Notably, the 8th, 10th and 12th grade students involved in the nationally representative survey also indicated that they have a higher perception of health risks associated with occasional cannabis use.
While the data over years shows that there was a “period of decline of the perception of harm,” that’s shifted even as more states have enacted legalization, she said. “That seems to have leveled off or reversed in that trend.”
There was also a “statistically significance increase” in youth disapproval of occasional marijuana use.
In the previous annual survey, NIDA and the University of Michigan inquired about the use of delta-8 THC, a cannabis compound that’s typically associated with synthesizing hemp-derived CBD and sold in a largely unregulated marketplace. This time, researchers asked more broadly about “cannabis products made from hemp” that could include a wider range of novel cannabinoids.
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