Teen Marijuana Use ‘Remained Stable’ As Legalization Expands, Federal Health Officials Acknowledge

Teen marijuana use remained stable. Not exactly a headline that screams panic, and that’s the point. The latest Monitoring the Future survey out of the University of Michigan—a long-running, federally funded barometer of youth substance use—looked under the hood of the American high school experience and found a steady hum instead of alarm bells. Past-year cannabis use landed at 25.7 percent for 12th graders, 15.6 percent for 10th graders and 7.6 percent for 8th graders. Past-month use? 17.1, 9.4 and 4 percent, respectively. Flat, or down compared to the old days when everyone’s uncle swears “kids were different.” The 12th-grade rate sits at its lowest level since 1992. That’s before smartphones, before retail storefronts with ID scanners, before this entire era of legal cannabis. Federal health officials noticed, too; as NIDA’s director put it in a measured understatement, teens’ relatively low use is encouraging and worth tracking closely to keep interventions smart and targeted. If you want the raw notes from the band, they’re right there in the source material—NIDA’s press release and the public data tables from Monitoring the Future are quietly matter-of-fact, almost boring in the best way, a reality check against loud narratives about adolescent chaos.

Here’s the texture in the numbers, the grit on the cutting board. While 12th graders ticked up slightly in past-month use, they’re still miles below the late-’70s peak of 37.1 percent—back when legalization wasn’t even a glimmer and yet the weed flowed like bad disco basslines. Meanwhile, abstention stayed strong: 66 percent of seniors, 82 percent of sophomores and 91 percent of eighth graders said they stayed away from marijuana, alcohol and nicotine in the last month. That’s not nothing. It suggests a cohort making choices in spite of all the ambient noise. There’s a subplot, too: hemp-derived intoxicants like delta-8 THC are on teens’ radar—9 percent of seniors, 6 percent of sophomores, 2 percent of eighth graders sampled them in the past year—reminding regulators that the borderlands of cannabis policy matter. The survey pulled 23,726 students from 270 schools between February and June 2025, enough voices to feel like a town-hall meeting with fluorescent lights and a box of stale donuts. The tale they told wasn’t a cliffhanger. It was routine, regulated, and refreshingly uneventful.

That uneventfulness is the quiet power of a legal framework. Licensed shops check IDs. Security cameras glare. Compliance officers live in spreadsheets. That’s boring by design—and it’s how you starve the illicit market that never cared how old you were. The Monitoring the Future results reinforce the premise that regulation beats prohibition when the goal is to reduce youth access. Adults, meanwhile, are the ones driving any overall uptick in cannabis consumption nationally—a generational shift reflected in policy debates and workplace rules. The government can reshuffle cannabis schedules or issue sweeping directives, but what happens at the job site still matters. For a reality check on the friction between changing laws and day-to-day rules, see how transportation regulators clarified that Trump’s Marijuana Order Doesn’t Change Drug Testing For Safety-Sensitive Workers, At Least For Now, Transportation Department Says. Policy rises like bread; workplaces slice it however they must, and teens aren’t the ones setting the menu.

Culturally, cannabis is no longer the contraband punchline hidden behind the garage. It’s a guest at the dinner table, often invited. Surveys keep finding what you already sense at Thanksgiving: adults are integrating weed into their lives, sometimes before a tense conversation about politics or the turkey’s dryness. File that under social lubrication, or harm reduction, or just “life is complicated,” but it’s undeniably adult-driven. Case in point: One In Three Americans ‘Pre-Game’ With Marijuana Before Family Holiday Gatherings, Survey Finds. If anything, the normalization of adult use is moving in lockstep with legalization, while teen rates hold or decline. It’s the same story drifting in from abroad and across states: when you regulate, kids don’t surge into the breach. And the broader drug policy map is shifting, too—psychedelic therapy is tiptoeing into statehouses, including a measure in the Garden State that just keeps clearing hurdles: New Jersey Bill To Legalize Psilocybin Therapy Clears Another Assembly Committee. This isn’t a wave anymore; it’s a tide chart.

All of which begs the federal question. The center of gravity is drifting toward a pragmatic endgame where Washington finally stops pretending the states aren’t running this experiment in plain sight. Preparation matters. If the political winds keep shifting, the next attorney general may not just enforce laws but also manage a transition. That’s why a proposal like Trump’s Attorney General Would Form A Marijuana Commission To Prepare For Federal Legalization Under New Senate Bill reads less like a stunt and more like logistics. Meanwhile, parents and policymakers should sit with the boring truth: teen marijuana use remained stable even as legalization expands. The work now is targeted—education where it counts, guardrails that hold, and a relentless focus on keeping access adult-only while adults, frankly, sort themselves out. If you prefer your cannabis conversation grown-up, nuanced, and responsibly sourced, you know where to find it—take a look at our curated selection here: https://thcaorder.com/shop/.