The percentage of adolescents reporting substance use in 2022 largely held steady after significantly declining in 2021, according to the latest results from the Monitoring the Future survey of substance use behaviors and related attitudes among eighth, 10th, and 12th graders in the United States.
Reported use for almost all substances decreased dramatically from 2020 to 2021 after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and related changes like school closures and social distancing. In 2022, reported use of any illicit drug within the past year remained at or significantly below pre-pandemic levels for all grades, with 11% of eighth graders, 21.5% of 10th graders, and 32.6% of 12th graders reporting any illicit drug use in the past year.
From February through June 2022, the Monitoring the Future investigators collected 31,438 surveys from students enrolled across 308 public and private schools in the United States. The completed survey from 2022 is nationally representative and represents about 75% of the sample size of a typical year’s data collection. The Monitoring the Future investigators noted that schools’ opt-in to participate in the survey, and some schools that normally participate opted-out this year as they continued to operationally recover from the pandemic. All participating students took the survey via the web – either on tablets or on a computer – with between 95-99% of respondents taking the survey in-person in school.
The survey found that adolescents most commonly reported use of alcohol, nicotine vaping, and cannabis in the past year, and levels generally held steady with those reported in 2021. For substances where reported past-year use did increase between 2021 and 2022, the vast majority of reported use remained at or below the pre-pandemic levels observed in 2020. Compared to levels observed in 2021, data reported in 2022 show:
- Nicotine vaping remained stable for all three grades surveyed, with 12% of eighth graders, 20.5% of 10th graders, and 27.3% of 12th graders reporting vaping nicotine in the past year.
- Cannabis use also remained stable for all three grades surveyed, with 8.3% of eighth graders, 19.5% of 10th graders, and 30.7% of 12th graders reporting cannabis use in the past year. Of note, 6.0% of eighth graders, 15.0% of 10th graders, and 20.6% of 12th graders reported vaping cannabis within the past year, reflecting a stable trend at the pre-pandemic level among eighth and 12th graders, and a small increase in reported use among 10th graders, though reported use among 10th graders in 2022 is still significantly below pre-pandemic levels.
- Alcohol use remained stable for eighth and 10th graders (with 15.2% and 31.3% reporting use in the past year, respectively) but returned to pre-pandemic levels for 12th graders in 2022 (with 51.9% of 12th graders reporting alcohol use in the past year).
- Any illicit drug use other than marijuana also remained stable for all three grades surveyed, with 4.9% of eighth graders, 5.7% of 10th graders, and 8.0% of 12th graders reporting any illicit drug use other than marijuana in the past year. These data build on long-term trends documenting low and fairly steady use of illicit substances reported among teenagers – including past-year use of cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, and nonmedical use of prescription drugs, generally.
- Use of narcotics other than heroin (including Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet, etc.) increased slightly among 12th graders between 2021 and 2022 (with 1.7% of 12th graders reporting use within the past year), consistent with the pre-pandemic levels observed in 2019 and 2020 (2.7% and 2.1%, respectively).
