Daily Pot Smoking Among College Kids Hit a 35-Year High
Toking has finally surpassed smoking.
Weed has officially dethroned cigarettes as the daily vice of choice for college kids, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study. The result is largely because the number of students blazing daily has hit its highest — whoa — peak in 35 years.
When the study began in 1980, 7.2 percent of kids admitted to daily or near-daily pot smoking, but the numbers declined in subsequent years, dropping to 3.5 percent in 2007. Last year, that number had jumped to 5.9 percent, reflecting the recent change in attitudes to weed.
Over half of high-school graduates in 2006 thought weed use was dangerous, but thanks to increasing legalization and scientific interest in the drug, that number decreased to 35 percent in 2014.
“It’s clear that for the past seven or eight years there has been an increase in marijuana use among the nation’s college students,” said Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator of the study, in a press release. “And this largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high-school seniors.”
As legalization continues to spread and pop media continues its ongoing love affair with weed, it’s likely that these trends will continue. So, come on, Class of 2016: You have something to fight for now. Class of 1980 is going down.
